I see your Hanlon's Razor, and I raise you Hanlon's Handgun of mine:

"Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by systemic incentives promoting malice."

I'm not sure what makes Google so different that it should be exempt from general trends around reviews. Businesses have their interest aligned here: removing negative reviews and faking positive reviews are beneficial to each individually, and can't be directly weaponized against competition. Google has no strong incentive to keep reviews honest; regular users will not replace Google Maps with OSM over a review issue, while a business might want to stop paying Google if they get bad experience on the marketing front.