As someone who works in the data analytics team of a gaming website network, I can tell you it's not as depressing as you think. But it's still pretty depressing. Back 6 years ago, everything was about SEO, so it was 100% "search" terms. Unsurprisingly, cheat and walkthrough websites did really well. I remember every website had a "cheats" guy. Their job was literally just to build a game faqs esque database of cheats and guides. It still exists, and the major sites still do it, but it's not nearly as profitable as it once was.
Today, everything is about sharing. People don't really go to websites anymore, they find everything through social media or forums like Era and Reddit. On one hand, this has been good for more niche games, especially Japanese games. If you can get a small yet concentrated and passionate group to start sharing your stuff, it'll eventually pass into the mainstream, which was impossible in the old days. But there has to be something immediately eye catching about the article or the headline, or else it won't work on social. But ultimately, it's kind of what you think it is: the articles about big games circulate the most. Click-bait headlines do well for a reason, especially ones that essentially "force" you to have an opinion or want to see if your opinion is refuted. This is shareable, it's the nature of the internet. If you asked me what does the best: PUBG (Just rotate in top selling game, really), deals, 90's nostalgia, and politically incendiary stuff (to a degree... too much and it actually turns people away. Hot takes do best, thoughtful opinions do not.).
But overall, it's actually an extremely depressing landscape in games media. Websites are less and less commercially viable as advertising dollars are going more and more towards the social networks themselves.
