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> they don't dominate

How do you know this? Outside of a few niche interests like mechanical keyboards or PC building, I'm not sure that most of the people on subreddits like vacuumcleaners.reddit.com are huge vacuum cleaner enthusiasts. It's just as likely that the people there have more skin in the game and are either marketers or resellers.

Befriend and talk directly to people who use or service particular items for a living. They have first-hand experience and went through different models. They know their quirks, tradeoffs, workarounds.

It doesn't scale and that's the point. If someone has a scalable audience, the incentives change.

They absolutely dominate - 90%+ of "reviews" on YouTube and Reddit are shilled in some way. They only don't look like marketing because they are explicitly designed to look like legitimate content.