About the only source of reviews I would believe isn't primarily paid advertorials is Consumer Reports, and those have to be filtered through CR's own particula

About the only source of reviews I would believe isn't primarily paid advertorials is Consumer Reports, and those have to be filtered through CR's own particular set of biases. Even sites that aren't blatantly pay to play (and Wirecutter was pretty obviously in that camp basically from the very start) are usually compromised by being provided expensive hardware they could not economically review otherwise, and know that negative reviews will cut them off from the very thing that enables them to exist. Picking signal out of the shill review background noise is really hard these days.