I think you hit the nail on the head. They won't steer you far wrong, but they also may neglect excellent options. For example, they recently published a "best water bottle of 2024" list. They chose to rate Hydroflask #1 and mentioned Yeti in a brief comment about "other bottles to consider" near the bottle. No mention of Kleen Kanteen at all. Yet they do cover the current trendy options of Owala & Stanley Quencher. I don't think it's really objective -- not in the same way that rtings.com is for the electronics categories they review.

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-water-bottle...

That's almost certainly true. Depending on your preferences, there are just a ton of perfectly serviceable options out there, including what you're handed at trade shows. I have some Nalgenes that are sort of the standard for hiking (and fit my water bottle parkas) and otherwise mostly random stuff I've been given.

No affiliate link = less likely to be a star pick?

That's probably a testable hypothesis, with a little screen scraping and some time.

Probably also hard to test. I was an analyst for many years and, if you generally hated on a company for reasons that you thought were valid, they were unlikely to hire you.