https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...
It goes beyond and deeper than that.
Affiliate-based ad-model is beholden to Amazon for revenue. If Amazon launches their own review site (ex: leveraging the Washington Post brand, as a hypothetical), then you can almost be assured that Wirecutter would be killed off. All Amazon has to do is stop paying paid affiliate-links and instead offer review services through Washington Post (and ONLY Washington Post).
We're beyond the point of simply having websites "function". We're at the stage of the internet where we need to consider how to build web-businesses / web-organizations that last for longer than 10 years, even in the face of unknown changes. Too many websites make short-term assumptions (such as "We can trust Amazon to keep giving us money perpetually"), and end up getting swallowed or shut-down as soon as those assumptions fail.
True: Amazon Affiliate links still are a decent source of money. But just two years ago, most people probably thought that Google Adsense money was good enough to be sustainable also. The collapse of the banner-ad money (as money has shifted to Youtube ads instead) has especially hit online sites (especially those without a Youtube presence) extremely hard.
At a minimum, that means you won't get to learn about smaller niche stores like JetPens.com (very good for stationary / high-quality pens), since such small stores don't have any affiliate links for Wirecutter to make money from.
As old and outdated as Consumer Reports is... they're clearly primarily driven through reader-contributions. There's a degree of independence through that methodology that affiliate links / advertisements / etc. etc. fails to replicate.
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Speaking of which: Jetpens.com, and other smaller niche online stores, do manage to solve the problem to some degree. Their blogposts about their products is certainly "shilling their store", but they review a wide enough variety of products that they've earned my trust. They aren't shilling for any particular company, they're simply shilling for their wares.
I guess smaller webstores really do have that advantage. As long as they have good and useful reviews on their blog ( https://www.jetpens.com/blog ), I'm going to be reading their posts and possibly buying their stuff. Yeah, its shilling their own website, but that's something that most people understand innately when they read the blog.
There's also a quality-level associated with the store brand: JetPens doesn't offer cheap or low-quality pens. You can pretty much buy stuff at random and get good stationary. Careful control of the store's inventory is clearly important to building a brand.
After all, if I wanted cheap stuff, I'd go to Amazon (or Walmart) instead. I'm going to JetPens because I feel like a premium quality pen or pencil.