Very much this.

Reviews are the worst way of figuring out where to eat without prior knowledge, except for all the other ways we have tried.

In a totally uniform space, even the smallest thing to help you stand out is enough to make first-order decision making latch on to the small thing. I suppose more advanced decision making would do some intentional exploration of the uniform space.

For many things, it just doesn't matter because all the options are basically fine, or they're cheap enough that the occasional dud isn't a big problem. When I want a local business, I just get whatever's nearby. Sometimes I look at reviews to make sure it's not a complete scam, which it never is. But I'm not going to pick one over the other because of a different number of stars on some site.

Say you're on vacation with a group of friends in a different country/city and looking for a nice restaurant one night. How do you choose where to go?

Fakespot is my go-to for some kind of signal to noise for real vs. fake reviews.

Example results include a letter grade, and a few fortune cookies of content like:

Our engine has analyzed and discovered that 58.7% of the reviews are reliable.

This product had a total of 511 reviews as of our last analysis date on Jul 19 2020.

Semi-private groups. You can join the relevant channel on discord/elements/facebook group. Avoid too big communities and you most likely will get better reviews than other places.