Price is a clear and obvious thing to measure, quality is much more difficult. Consumers get little or no formal education in quality, and advertisements (and even review sites!) almost never address it properly. Any review site that is paid for by ads or affiliate links has the default position of trying to get you to buy something.
How can you possibly know if you’re getting a quality product when the reviews you’re reading are for a model that doesn’t exist anymore, or are meaningless generalizations about a mega conglomerate? Saying “Brand X sucks/wins” only has the potential to be meaningful when it’s a single company in a single area and that has made that exact model in the same way for longer than your warranty on it. “Whirlpool sucks/wins” is as meaningless as reading “Water tastes good/bad” from everyone on the planet.
It's worse than that, the _same model_ from the same company can be quietly changed.
Most consumers, me included, are not making purely rational decisions based in price and quality, even in domains where they are qualified to judge quality.
The thing that annoys me the most is when the reviewer opens the box, shakes it gently and says "feels well built" or "plastic build". It is actually harmful. Weight doesn't equal quality (there is some correlation, building well often results in more weight, but it is unreliable and easy to game) and plastic is a huge range of materials and some are absolutely the most robust option for many use cases (think a sturdy plastic water bottle that outlasts and glass or metal equivalent).
The problem is quality is very hard to measure. The only really good test is to use the product for many years. But by that time the existing model hasn't been sold for years, in theory you could correlate the new model's quality with the old one but brands are apparently disposable these days so it is very likely that all costs were cut on the new one once their previous model gained a reputation for quality.
I think the only real measure for quality is a warranty. That is the manufacturer promising a lifespan. However they are usually short, can be unreliable to get (often at manufacturer discretion) and more often than not cover only "manufacturing defects" not reasonable wear and tear.
Agree. However, a good reviewer should be able to transfer knowledge from many years of use about a similar product to a new product and give an insightful evaluation. This type of reviewer is exceedingly rare.