I remember when Kotaku started (long before they were bought out) and they were lauded as being immune to this interference. Same with Giant Bomb, which has now changed hands many times.
I'm not saying the current system is perfect - I'm just saying that my own preference has completely changed. I stopped reading game reviews probably a decade ago and now I have a small selection of creators who have proven themselves to me. They didn't do so by trying to be a YouTube equivalent of game journalism (ala TotalBiscuit or Zero Punctuation) but simply by playing thousands of games. The review is incidental, their primary focus is on playing the game.
The days of listening to the opinion of someone who played the game for 5 hours in a rush to meet a deadline are gone for me. The days of someone shoe-horning reviews into gameplay/sound/ui/audio breakdowns are gone for me. For almost any game I care about there is someone who is just playing it, and I watch them play it, and decide for myself.
The thing with lets-players and different youtubers is there are a bunch of small time ones that like a particular genre and play things around that. If you don't like the ones you're seeing, search around and you'll typically find a number of different people playing the game and putting up on YT.
The issues aren't sponsorships which are always obvious, it's that content creators are by the very nature of their business model completely audience captured. They don't review things that aren't going to get them clicks on their channels, and if they do they're unlikely to give a truly controversial opinion that conflicts with the views of their audience or sours the relationships with a publisher.
That is the real value of journalism, gaming or otherwise. There's a firewall between the audience and the writer and there's institutional power that gives writers independence. Content creators are, the overwhelming amount of the time, just an amplified version of their median audience member which is why companies love them much more than journalists, and it also means there's zero signal in what they say.