This is the popular narrative, but what it misses is how relying on the public/internet at large to fund criticism (or even art in general), you’re not going to get the kind of niche hyper-expert analysis that previously would have been funded by a newspaper or magazine owner. Fifty years ago, you could pick up a newspaper and expect the critic to be fairly educated in the topic. Nowadays you have to go to the third page of YouTube results to find a similar level of expertise, if you can find it at all, and that critic isn’t making a living at it.

Reddit has plenty of its own biases and isn’t a great source either.