Agreed. The critical ones are the useful ones.

I do the same, but as time goes by I'm inherently less and less trustful of all of it. The incentive to manipulate ratings and reviews is just too great for sellers to ignore, and it's not as though Amazon can reliably measure review honesty.

Use fakespot.com and use filtered by "Verified Purchase".

What does verified purchase matter when so many sellers pay people to review? Yes they really bought it, but for pennies on the dollar.

Yeah I've started going for products that only have "hundreds" of reviews, and over several years, those are usually hard to game :)

You are just upping the stake. Some people DO pay for hundreds of reviews. It just cost more to do.

I always find it more interesting to look at the distribution of ratings that they have. It's usually overwhelmingly good, overwhelmingly bad, or polarising, with lots of good and lots of bad.

That to me is a pretty good quick-window into the level of quality of the product.