The sheer scale of situations where the top review is negative describes something that ... is not a bug, is actually supposed to be that way, is how the dang app works by design for good reason ... is bonkers.
It seems like reviews are driven by people who don't know, and respond reviews by to people who don't know who describe what sounds like fundamentally broken things... so they give it a thumbs up and they're both completely ignorant.
The volume of people who do know the app and would see / write a review seems like it is MUCH smaller.
I had a game app update recently. I went to update it (one of the few times I go directly to the play store app). There at the top is a review that described how they saw opposing players "just disappear" during the game and raged about that 'bug'. But it's not a bug the game has some fog of war and view distance type mechanic. It's entirely expected / appropriate.... but there it is the top review.
Heh. One of Google's featured reviews for ZXing is a one star review from someone who said they started getting popup ads, and looked up the issue on a web forum which said it was ZXing's fault. It has 30+ thumbs up.
Absolutely pathetic.
I've left online reviews a total of maybe 5 times ever. It was only ever to help very small businesses with very few reviews who gave me an exceptional and unexpected result in one way or another.
This statement seems very suspect to confirmation bias. How would you get to know if what you think is genuine was actually fake? This part of feedback loop is completely missing, and hence I find your above statement hard to believe.
One solution might be to only publish reviews/ratings from accounts with a minimum spend threshold and unique active payment details. This would effectively price out the scammers.