Starfield is a pretty good example of your last paragraph. The US IGN reviewer gave the game a 7/10 the day before the early release and the subreddit collectively lost its minds over it. I got downvoted for saying “hey let’s wait just a minute, perhaps the game really is only a 7?”, because of course that was inconceivable.

After about 30 hours logged into it and consistently passing up playtime in favor of the other games in my rotation, I can definitively state the game in its current form is realistically close to being a 7/10. That may have been the most honest review of the game in existence, in retrospect.

The popular opinion for the consumption of entertainment seems to have this weird thing about anything being less than an 8.5 or a 9 being considered trash tier. You have to evaluate those ratings with the mental adjustment necessary to see what those numbers are meant to actually represent. A 5/10 should be considered a bang average game or film, and yet anything with a rating that low is considered to be an absolute failure. Some people are more honest in the ratings than others, but there’s no quick point of reference to compare for each reviewer. It’s a chaotic wasteland of different, competing schools of thought on that topic.