Indeed, it's a freaking scourge. My current tactic is to append "reddit" to my searches. Often there's a subreddit of mostly genuine enthusiasts about $thing.
In the last year I’ve bought a great garbage disposal, some all weather tires, a pellet grill, and a dishwasher based off their recommendations. Often times instead of getting the very best rates of something I’ll buy the second best which is often 1/2 the price. Sometimes the best of an item is really cheap compared to other brands that are shinier but objectively worse at the core function of the product.
We ask a lot of our chargers these days (e.g. 100w USB-C PD), and the price-quality curve seems to be very jumpy. Have had good experiences with companies like Anker or Aukey, but also seen tear-downs of failed units one price tier down that had zero isolation between mains voltage and what's going to the device. Would love to find some better guidance on buying such things.
For instance, I've bought stuff from Aukey and Ravpower that's worked well so far, but I wouldn't necessarily call those name brands yet in the US, unlike Anker.
I'm sure I end up with results biased towards whatever's in vogue for that community and likely something a bit more expensive, but it seems to have been a reasonably successful strategy in terms of getting things that fit my needs.
Wonder if there's a good way to facilitate finding such resources and avoiding the endless SEOed spam that one gets when googling any item for reviews/recommendations.