Interesting point, yeah. Does it need to be a PR company, though? If I bought NVDA I'd also be incentivized to talk about how healthy the company looks.
Personally, I don't think it's (paid) PR per se. Call me cynical but I'm fairly sure TechCrunch has always been mostly lightly laundered press kits. This is, of course, something that is endemic across most trade or trade-adjacent media.
Presskits are now on par with police reports: largely reported ad objective truth even when historical context would properly shade those reports.
News is at high AI risk precisely because it easily adopts whatever POV the subject wants.