I think a better way to rephrase this is "judging 10s/100s of people in a few minutes, at days on end."
Judging people for looks isn't new, but being picky is easier if there are 1000 options easily available. In pre-internet times there was a much harder limit on how many people you could choose from.
Btw tangentially related is the secretary problem - trying to select how many people to reject before selecting the statistically best choice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem).
Citation? This is an extraordinary claim.