I won't speak for other reviewers, but I can tell you my reaction to this theory. Because I play so many games (both during and outside of my job), I'm always looking for something new. I still have fun going through the motions with by-rote experiences, but such games rarely excite me. It takes something new and daring to get my attention, either from a gameplay or storytelling standpoint.
But reviewers all have different tastes, so you just have to find a few who you can relate to.
Well like I said, I'm just trying to figure it out. It perplexes me how often I have seen what seems to be a reversal of enthusiast press vs. audience in other mediums. As I have said elsewhere, in films, music, etc. we constantly find critics attempting to challenge their audience to demand more of their entertainment, not to settle for the latest blockbuster or paint by numbers sequel. It is the audience who say things about critics like "they read too much into it" or that they are "too critical."
Meanwhile, we have seen so many times recently where the relationship between games media and audience functions in the exact reverse way. Mass Effect 3, Diablo 3, Dragon Age 2, Halo 4, DmC, Assassin's Creed 3, etc. Games that all recieved nearly universal praise by critics. Then the games come out and fans "backlash" against these games for being uninspiring or not as good as previous entries and it is the critics who claim that fans are acting "entitled" and disrespectful of the hard work that went into making games. I seriously cannot imagine a film critic telling Transformer's audience that they are "self entitled" for wanting a better film.
What is weirder to me is there eventually the fans seem to win the critical argument in the long term. I listen to a lot of gaming podcasts and I can't count the number of times in recent months where those games above come up on Giant Bomb or Rebel FM or Game informer podcasts and dudes express the same kind of mediocre reaction that fans expressed, a kind of "yeah, in hindsight, maybe that didn't turn out to be amazing..." and I just sit there and think "huh, where you were you dudes when these games were being reviewed?
These days I find the best I can do is watch videos and read forums and wait a week. I simply can't trust pre-release reviews most of the time. They seem to be written in a different environment with different results. What shapes that environment and the pre-release opinions, I'm not sure. I'm definitely not claming any kind of facile "money hate" conspiracy. I just know there are some pretty large disparities between the opinions that come from the pre-release environment and the consensus that develop afterwards.