Stellar review scores for games you subjectively consider abysmal?Game "journalism" these days is far too based on access and quid-pro-quo for any kind of expose to be published, except in a case where the development studio has already closed its doors. Nobody who had been granted inside access to a studio would dare publish anything uncomplimentary, lest such access be revoked. You have only to look at the stellar review scores for abysmal games to see this principle in action.

There's often a gap between critic scores and user scores, but this is hardly unique to video games (film is another great example, and the industry there is very different and in some cases a fair bit older than video games). There are also plenty of examples where mainstream gaming outlets have dared to give a less-than-perfect score to various video games, leading to outcries that the journalists simply Don't Appreciate Genius well enough.
It's complicated (and completely off-topic, really). Personal opinions on "games journalism" are often incredibly reductive and hard to argue with, as your opinion demonstrates. The only general truths are a) publishers are risk-averse, and not above being petty, and b) quid-pro-quo exists because humans are inherently flawed. And even this is me being reductive! There is no evidence that can be leveraged against the medium other than to state "it exists", and people that insist the entire medium is flawed are often doing so from positions of bias themselves.