As a *small* youtuber the problem is a few things:
1. If a new product comes out, and they think you are going to review it critically, they won't give you early access to it. They want only positive reviews, so while they won't outright tell you "you must review this amp positively," they just carefully select who they will allow to do a review to get their desired result. It's like survey questions, if you have a specific result in mind that you want, you'd only survey a certain group of people or ask certain carefully designed questions - it's not a true unbiased opinion they want.
Plus, getting those reviews out early with a launch like this guarantees a positive hype. If you do have someone willing to do a more critical review (myself included), I'd have to wait for release, maybe even wait list, plus buy it all with my own money. By the time my review comes out, it might be 3 months after everyone else when the hype has died down and it's already been decided, and by then probably 1/10th the number of people are even still searching for stuff on it.
2. When you are critical of a product, the fans of that product will come out in full force to be dicks to you. And to make it worse, many of these people don't even own the product and their opinion was decided by that first wave of new reviews. I softened my language *substantially* when reviewing the 2020 Kramer Nightswan and I still get the occasional bitter comment about that video. Most people have been very nice to me on YT and elsewhere, but I've seen coments/emails sent to other youtubers that are pretty awful, even my tiny channel I've had to block a few people. So imagine if I have 3 loud jerks on my channel with only 1800 subs what it's like for someone with 18,000 or 180,000 subs. So that discourages critical reviews.
3. People in it - not even necessarily for profit, but just to break even - do not get their videos ranked highly by the algorithm. There's also lots of other little shitty things about Youtube I can get into, for example my JCM900 video was claimed for 30 days because I played the riff from "Basket Case" in it. They lost and I kept the video, but all of the ad revenue from that 30 days went to youtube, not me. I mean it was like $5, but still. This gets worse for people who review things like games or movies, I remember there was a whole thing where negative movie reviews were getting copyright claimed by big companies like Sony and Disney, then since it's fair use, the claim is cancelled, but it's still enough to take away the vast majority of the income for that review.
So if videos that are more in depth, or negative, or even middling about a product are not shown as highly in youtube search results or dashboards, and they are delayed by months by either copyright shenanigans or waiting for the product to actually come out.... and the money made from a video is highly dependent on how quickly the video is released... you can see how it quickly becomes stacked against content creators that don't just "get in line."
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Long story short, you make more money, get a larger audience, and piss fewer people off if you just say "yeah, this product is great, look how great it is." There are always people that fall outside of this, gain some traction in another group or as an alternative viewpoint, but it is much less common to be successful that way.
PS I'm not blaming any of these people or calling them "shills" or whatever this type of discussion usually degenerates to. Just explaining from my perspective why it ends up this way.
