they are certainly inferior from the point of view of Netflix and the few others, because they are not obviously fakeable like the thumbs counts. For users, it is probably the opposite.

Definitely. Go look at new music video releases on youtube, so many of them are buying views to boost their numbers. The real trick there is to see how many up/downvotes there are in relation to the views, which seem to be the only way these days to gauge their true success from a consumer point of view.