With something like exercise bikes, the calculus changes. You're going to have much fewer ratings, and people tend to only buy one bike every 10+ years, and they'll want to buy the best one they can afford. Now there's a real incentive for a company to manipulate the ratings, and it's also much easier to do so.
I totally agree though that the current inability to answer the question isn't new. And I don't think that will change - I don't really see a viable alternative to the current situation. But if someone comes up with one then I'll be very excited to see it, as the current approach of using lists from big sites to go find higher-quality reviews from smaller sites is not the most efficient. But maybe that's not the worst thing - I like that there's still value to small independent reviewers.
IMO this is true.
It used to be however that the search results contained the phrase you looked for. This was later I think revised to also include pages that had links with the text in question pointing to them.
This kind of made sense for some queries (opinion based?), but for other queries (looking for technical content) it is actively harmful as it drowns out every useful site.