Yes, people noticed it's good. But that's not how I heard about the game. That's not how anyone in the three separate groups of friends I heard about the game from heard about it. In fact, the only person I knew who really follows that sort of stuff is the only person I know who wasn't interested.
I think you're confusing cause and effect. If you look at steam's concurrent player counts, you see that the number of concurrent players kept increasing for the first 10 days after the game's release. That's not consistent with curators instructing people to buy a game at release. That's consistent with massive word-of-mouth spread. Everyone is talking about it and rating it highly because it's good, not because they were told to.