Never thought about it, but you're totally right! I mean, I never followed the sites you named, but I had the same exact trajectory of different review sites over the last 15 years or so. Right now, I don't really follow any single one. I wonder why these organizations get so toxic as to end up like they all do.
I think (of course I do) that it has to do with the way they were built in the first place. It wasn't the most legitimate of endeavors in the first place, and the only reason they found any purchase was because nobody was really applying any rules or minding the store at all.
You had a bunch of men with an outlet that afforded them cheap, easy power for doing nothing more than commenting on, promoting, and appropriating intellectual property that wasn't theirs.
Whole
groups of people basically only got into this shit because they figured they could get big enough online that someone
in the system would legitimize them and hand them a check for it. And that dream (such as it was) kept getting stoked by the two or three people a year who managed to actually
make that jump to some degree of success or another. And when that
didn't happen for a lot of people, their weird little communities started collapsing. The center hollowed out due to a starved sense of self-importance.
Essentially: Old man-children only got older and less successful/necessary, and that corrodes whatever product they were putting out. So either you quit doing it and find something worthwhile, or you keep chasing that diminishing high until you just burn out completely.
Or you just grind for whatever's left no matter what and become some sort of stooped, Gru-lookin type of cellar dweller for the sake of maintaining your collectibles habit.