Most digital product "reviews" are just affiliate pages
If a review has a checkout link in the first screen, it's an ad.
That's the whole test. Not "is the person famous." Not "did they use it for 30 days." If the page exists to send you to a cart, you already know the verdict.
Here's how I actually review something before I'd tell a friend to buy it:
Pay for it myself. If I only got a free affiliate account, I say so. Free access makes you nicer than you should be.
Do the thing it claims, once, all the way through. A course you "sampled" is not a course you finished. A tool you opened once is not a tool you ran a week of work through.
Write the skip reasons first. If I can't name three, I'm still in the honeymoon. The buy case comes after.
Check the refund. If they make it annoying to get your money back, that's the review.
The people who got burned by a $497 "community" didn't fail because they were lazy. They failed because the review they trusted was a sales page with a star rating.
I'll keep a short list here of what's worth it and what isn't. No countdown timers. No "only 3 spots." If something's good, it stays good when you buy it next week.