Astroturfing is a kind of manipulation where you mislead people about attribution, so that they associate what you say/do with a group or person of your choice.
For example, say that you really have an axe to grind with the programming language Rust, and are aware that people have a perception or would find it believable that its community is obnoxious, through being pedantic or overzealous.
What you could then do is join in on conversations and start talking as if you were a member of the Rust community, and act pedantic, overzealous, or otherwise obnoxious. Due to the pretense that you're a Rust user yourself, people would attribute this behavior to the Rust community, meaning you succeeded in boosting this negative perception.
Just an example of course.
quoting a definition:
The implication behind the use of the term is that instead of a "true" or "natural" grassroots effort behind the activity in question, there is a "fake" or "artificial" appearance of support. It is increasingly recognized as a problem in social media, e-commerce, and politics. Astroturfing can influence public opinion by flooding platforms like political blogs, news sites, and review websites with manipulated content. Some groups accused of astroturfing argue that they are legitimately helping citizen activists to make their voices heard.
even uses the same verbiage you did originally.
Regardless, this is a distinct claim from score manipulation, which unquestionably did occur.
Brands pay influencers to promote their products in order to raise brand awareness, it is enough that people know some X or Y product exists so if they need something that X or Y products satisfies they will recall that their heard about X or Y product.
Investigation: GamersNexus Files New Lawsuit Against PayPal & Honey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKbFBgNuEOU
I'll note it's not only unpopular now with a "smaller group of users" but also with influencers too now as they've realized it kills their own revenue by altering referral codes.
Now, if Google suddenly gets a spike in negative reviews, and a lot of them are from Chrome-connected accounts where they can see they've never downloaded that extension, or a lot of them appear to be from users who never used it, then they may have reason to remove or not weight those reviews the same. Just like where an establishment has built up a good reputation, and then something unpopular happens on camera and goes viral & so a bunch of people that have never been there flood the reviews.
What seems most likely to me is that Honey is still a rather popular extension, that what might bother you or the techcentric groups you follow doesn't really matter to a vast majority of users. It may be unfortunate, especially if people are getting misled or Honey is engaged in corruption. If people cared about corruption companies like Comcast/Xfinity would be non-existent IMO. Unfortunately they don't. If people want Google to ban/unfeature Honey, then wouldn't it be better to have a court judgement declaring Honey broke the law, rather than doing it just because it was unpopular to a much smaller group of users than the ones that thought Honey was the greatest cause their favorite influencer told them it was?