You say that, but the very first thing I see is "Father’s Day Gifts Your Dad Will Love". Not "Recommended Gifts for Father's Day", or something similarly objective, just straight up manipulation like all the other adverts.
That's fair, the gift guides don't seem to be particularly useful; however, I've found the buying guides to be really useful, to the extent that I have developed muscle memory for "best X wirecutter" whenever I need to buy a thing I don't have strong opinions about / don't want to do a bunch of research for.
For instance "The Best Steak Knife Set" [1], lays out a couple of options and why you might pick them as well as their criteria and test methodology so you can figure out why you might want to pick something else.
Wire cutter is manipulation masked in honest reviews. I’ll say the unpopular because people are so hellbent on convincing themselves those reviews give a damn about products with no affiliate links. Oh “but they make recommendations for nonadfiliated products!” Yeah, what percentage of the whole is that? Mmmmmmmhmmmm.
Stuff like this is in a sense worse. Everyone knows ads are ads. But these are 'unbiased' reviews which are totally biased, requiring them to actually distort objective information where required.
If the product is big enough I'll skim reddit. Nothing like hearing the hard facts from a pissed off anonymous hivemind that isn't going to let anyone off the hook. Even the apple subreddit has been crucifying the company as they keep falling down the stairs with every keyboard half-fix they silently release (I think we are at 'gen 4' now).
On the other hand there's certainly attempts at manipulating content on sites like reddit too for advertising purposes. Though I don't know if there are good statistics on how prevalent it is
