That's actually one indication of how quality has gone down. When I was a kid, I remember a lot of big ticket items would have "lifetime" warranties or 20 year warranties, but these days it's hard to find anything with a warranty of more than a couple years, unless you buy separate "supplementary" warranty, which is really more of insurance than a warranty.
Yes, that's the split we see. Set 2 is always more negative, so the interesting part isn't how negative it is, it's what the complaints are about. That varies a lot between categories.
Owners also have a lot more time to notice all of the stuff that's not quite right. The cars with touchscreens for example all have an absurd number of weird, sometimes very annoying, software bugs that come up in edge cases or only occur intermittently that you probably wouldn't notice if just taking a test drive.
Few car owners spend a lot of time thinking about the stuff their car didn't screw up or have a good basis for comparing those to a wide range of comparable vehicles.
Reviewers are also usually biased towards reviewing products that are good and/or interesting, and while that's also true of consumers, you'd expect reviewers to be more informed.
Probably part of it. A lot of reviewers get their units for free and it's easier to be happy with something you didn't pay for. We can't tell which reviews were sponsored, so we can't measure that directly.
One unfortunate thing is that Amazon blocked all reviews that said "In exchange for an honest and unbiased review, I received ..." which was a good marker of product crapitude. It makes sense for Amazon to do that since it makes them look better but as a user I wish it hadn't happened - because of AI I can now review all the crap reviews easily. It would have been good to have known.
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