It's a cycle we go through with most really big games.
Backlash is proportional to a game's reach, so when we're talking about backlash to popular games, we have to remember there are many more voices talking about it than less popular games.
The bigger a game is, the more people take an interest in it, and the bigger a target it presents. This has knock-on effects that can be difficult for us to always see from the ground.
Think of the size of something like Mario's audience, right? In real numbers, there are probably more people that have something negative to say about Mario within its own audience than the entire audiences of, I dunno, Hotline Miami, Celeste and Hollow Knight combined.
(Probably)
Either way, that's a lot of voices and a lot resulting 'noise', right, and it makes it hard to be heard.
Opinions, particularly from content creators that require attention in a heavily competitive market (Twitter, YouTube, etc.), tend to become more polarised simply to be heard.
So RDR2 can't just have, I dunno, awkward controls; it has to be completely broken or the worst controlling game of all-time or a conspiracy by the gaming press to assuage their Rockstar paymasters.
Whether we like it or not, we're influenced by what we consume to varying degrees. Sometimes we unwittingly poach their opinions or we rely on content creators we like for validation, or we see things that nudge us into making up our minds when we can't quite put our finger on it. Not to that degree all the time, sure, but I reckon this happens more often than we all care to admit.
I'd argue these polarised opinions trickle down into everyday conversation, with the 'loudest' and (more importantly) the most persistent opinion (good memes help here) in a given pocket of the internet winning out. From the ground, it looks like the opinion is unilateral, but it is rarely as it seems.
So we end up in a kind of lingual arms race. Everything is either GODLIKE or DOGSHITE, and DOGSHITE usually wins out because it lends itself to more copy and more comedy (the latter of which really stands out). Which all leaves little room for nuance because, sadly, nuance doesn't get attention.
