Yeah but that was never a distinguishing property. All gaming journalism was pretty bad at the time and continues to be bad. This is why the fig leaf of "ethics in games journalism" was so attractive to anyone not paying close attention to GG: it was an open secret that many game reviews were either outright paid by publishers or written by journalists held on a tight leash with exclusive early access privileges implied to be contingent on positive review scores. I grew up in the 90s and 00s and I very much recall the boiling hatred for EA for buying out successful developers, restructuring them and leaving empty husks that churn out infinite sequels until the IP ran dry. People used to make fun of games like Call of Duty for boiling down all narrative mechanics to quick time events while railroading you through a third rate movie.

Kotaku ended up being singled out over the allegations regarding Depression Quest where it pretty much became ground zero for GG. The allegations themselves were mostly fueled by a cultural backlash of "true gamers" against "walking sims", the derogatory label for projects using games as medium for interactive narratives and experiences, which they saw as a threat to traditional gaming and gamer culture (which makes more sense if you compare it with the Great Replacement conspiracy theory and see it as a precursor to the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory especially popularised by Jordan Peterson).

Heck, even the affiliation was shaky at best: a person claiming to be the ex of the person who created Depression Quest accused a journalist writing for Kotaku to have given Depression Quest positive coverage while they were in a relationship. So at worst the argument was that the developer used a friend to create attention for the game by writing about it without disclosing their (at the time non-romantic) relationship. Compared to what every major gaming journalist was doing with triple-A publishers at the time this was a nothing burger - except GGers disliked what the game represented (i.e. progressives using games as a medium for interactive art pieces) and who was behind it (women and queer folk, i.e. people with "political" genders/ethnicities/orientations rather than straight-passing white-passing cis-passing men).