Now that everyone is (or aspires to be) a "celebrity", you can trust no one. Sure, social media was never completely genuine but the fakeness was generally limited to bolstering someone's social status, not promote garbage from for-profit companies.
And when it comes to trying to find real opinions about potential purchases etc online, I don’t really use reviews anymore (and never looked for it in influencer world to begin with). These days if I want real opinions on something I search for product $X site:reddit.com and see what comes up. Even then I figure there’s some astroturfing but it’s still more reliable than, say, Amazon reviews.
In the traditional case there are sponsorships where pre-existing fame unrelated to the target paid promotion is used to lend the target a false veneer of legitimacy through that fame. Not so great.
In the "Influencer" case a person has sort of deliberately & explicitly set themselves up as a broker-dealer [1] of attention they have aggregated from the masses of the internet population. Their endorsement of a product/service is no more valid than those with traditional pre-existing fame. So, also not so great.
And when I reference the democratization of this sort of paid shilling I'm thinking about it from the perspective of those doing the shilling: There are more opportunities to everyday people to get in on that by hustling to become an influencer. But there's another population to consider: those who consume the content & paid shilling.
The average consumer probably understands that the athlete/actor/whatever that is, for example, shilling a Citi Bank credit card has no special expertise in banking, comparative appraisals of different credit card offerings, etc. They know it's just a paid gig for the celebrity so the bank can forge a pleasant psychological association for consumers.
On the other hand, influencers often represent themselves & their paid endorsements as if they were authentic/organic opinions on whatever product or service they're being paid to shill.
In the later case it seems like there's a lot more potential for people to be deceived & not realize that the influencer's opinions were sold to the highest bidder and aren't authentic representations of their true thoughts on the product/service.
In that respect, no, not an improvement at all. Quite the opposite.
I guess that doesn’t exactly make the activity better, but it at least no longer feels like a further degeneration perpetrated by modern social networks. And it is a sort of democratization of the lucrative paid shill activities concentrated among the very few.