Have affiliate commissions polluted reviews?

Ignoring Amazon's Affiliate program for a moment, there's already enough incentive for manufactured, astro-turfed reviews. And even when there's real, legitimate reviews left by purchasers of a product, the store page owner could change the quality of the product being sold - silently start shipping knock-off versions as opposed to the real thing - or even reuse a product for a wildly different product. (I know this has happened plenty in the past, I wonder if Amazon has cracked down on that behaviour? Even so, that it has happened so frequently in the past doesn't help since we're talking about 'losing trust'.) These practices have hurt much more than their affiliate program has, in my view.

My grandparents (in England) were longtime subscribers to a magazine named Which (which.co.uk). I have no idea if it's the same thing anymore, but at least 15 years ago it was a (very middle-class, quite expensive) magazine that would review family cars, vacuum cleaners, televisions and so on. The whole selling point of that magazine was 50 years of built-up trust, they'd lay out in detail how they'd do their blind testing and their rigor in testing, and very publicly owning when they made mistakes or got things wrong. Are there any online equivalents that have this sort of cache and trust associated with them? If you were to buy, say, a laptop, or a new washing machine... where would you go?

In general, the in-depth review sites that I tend to go to for reviews seem to be fairly trustworthy. One thing working in their favor, is that they tend to review many similar products and could collect referral commissions on most or all of the products they review, so there is reduced incentive to give a positive review of a bad product.

There are, however, two types of sites benefiting from referrals that I have a complete lack of trust in. The first is tech news sites (Gizmodo, for example) that feature posts about sales on specific items. Sometimes these are actually good deals on good products, but often a little research indicates that the price and/or the product are nothing special and they're just trying to drum up referral bucks. Often times these sites still post actual reviews worthy of reading, but I definitely will not depend solely on that one review.

The category of sites that I wish I could just erase from the internet is the SEO blogs that seem to exist for just about anything these days. Often times these purport to be review sites, but a little digging reveals they're likely just people regurgitating information from manufacturers and making recommendations for products they've never actually used. For popular product categories, I often have to sort through pages of search results to find a page that's not just some low-effort SEO blog. I shudder to think about how many consumers may be misled by these sites and make poor choices because of them.