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[A Black Falcon]

How are opinions on games "more informed than they used to be" when we have fewer professional journalists than ever and have to rely on Youtuber "influencers" and such, many of whom are being paid by the companies they are making videos about in a much more direct way than would happen in traditional journalism?  Journalism's had a steep decline in the last few decades, thanks to the internet, and game journalism is no exception.

Sure, it's nice that you can look up footage of just about any game ever on the internet, but if you want review coverage of those games that tries to objectively cover them... well, you'd better be looking for a major title because those are the only ones that get that.  As I pointed out an overwhelmingly huge number of games release all the time, but most are never noticed at all, there aren't anywhere remotely near enough legitimate game journalists to cover even a tiny fraction of the total.  So you instead need to rely on random people on the internet and hope they're legit, or just judge for yourself based on gameplay footage you find.

More worrying when it comes to the Switch is the rise of shovelware and asset flips.  Nintendo opened the flood gates, and in came the trash.  There's just certain games that by all rights shouldn't exist and aren't worth preserving.

Yeah, Nintendo has basically dropped almost all quality regulations when it comes to releasing on their platform, no question.  That's a major cause of why the Switch has such an insane number of games, it's dramatically easier to get on Switch than Xbox or Playstation.  Is this good or bad, well, it's kind of both; having an insane number of options is nice because there are always dozens of potentially interesting games to try that you've surely never heard of, but on the other hand, as you say, many are pretty bad and aren't worth buying.  And of course it's hard to tell which ones are good and which are bad without playing them.