Elizabeth Hardwick wrote "The Decline of Book Reviewing" in Harpers in 1959, and then went on to co-found the NYRB with Robert Silver during a big publishing strike.
In general, stuff like this is insanely inside baseball and navel gazing for the book review industry (of which little remains of the old glory days).
That said, I don't know anyone into literature who takes the NYTBR seriously. That the Best Seller list is a gamified black box is basically an open secret. The NYTBR, in particular, has become far too interconnected into the MFA-publishing-literature industrial complex. The reviews are so bland and milquetoasty because so much MFA-lit is bland as all hell and the reviews are just marketing.
The NYRB and the LRB are orders of magnitude better reading than the NYTBR, even if this article seems to criticize them (unfoundedly, in my opinion) as fuddy or old fashioned. They're not traditional "reviews" in the sense that they usually don't come around to saying whether a book is good or bad, though; they're essays that use the books reviewed as launch vehicles for pushing the ideas in them into new directions or put under a new light. The NYTBR, in contrast, often reads as ad copy or toothless summary (the latter being the plague that has infected nearly all film criticism as well).
There has also been a big resurgence in smaller mags, like N+1 (now an elder statesmen of the new upstarts), The Drift, The European Review of Books (heavy focus on translation), and many others that have excellent, lively, criticism. Also subreddits like r/truelit are a great way to expose yourself to new or interesting books. I usually find a book to add to my TBR list once or twice a week. Is the writing always up to par with professional publications? Not always, but sometimes it honestly is. (r/truelit does have a strong slant towards formal experimentation, though, which some people aren't a fan of. People more interested in "the classics" or contemporary-lit can find great recs still in r/literature.)