There's more to it I guess. Even Fachzeitschriften nowadays are feeling the need to adress larger audiences. And the online-press is under heavy pressure time-wise. They feel they absolutely need to get the article out at launch and after that there's the next review waiting already. It's not helping that bascially everyone takes „free“ work for granted.
You are generalizing. In the engineering space I have not observed any out-of-its-own-space fishing. We have a few of them coming in every month or quarter or bianually and circulating the office. That doesn't mean there are none doing, just that there are some not doing it. There are more engineers than ever, no need to diversify, would be my guess. I also didn't observe rushing with stories, they are published when the author feels he covered all (or the relevant for the article) bits, which means sometimes half a year of latency (not because of publishing frequency).
I know there is the more interesting question lingering below the meta-discussion: Are number of CUs a good markting instrument for consumers? If yes, what do you need to do in your articles to make everyone understand what exactly it is and what it means? If not, what do you have to do to break the vicious circle of marketing departments obsession over "number races" and "checkbox accumulations"?
I'd prefer to stay away from any marketing effords of the current IHVs (as a writer, hypothetically), there is not much innovation going on, there is no justification to write an in-depth piece for every release, there is not enough information to make a piece correct.
Then there is the question of using games for benchmarking, which I think is very questionable. Because you have no chance to decompose the games software effect from the hardware effect, and tend to attribute everything to hardware, until contradictions appear, and then the attribution is simply like sampling an RNG.
For as long as games are not looked at with RGA or Nsight or RenderDoc I don't see conformation for an attempt to even be serious about analyzing the situation and trying to find answers. Or for as long as a writer doesn't blame the engine first and foremost for observed performance (which requires skill and knowledge or good contacts, or guts).
I don't believe in big picture statistics (smash all games benchmarks in a statistic and pretend that it's a good or valid thing to do). Not about age, or gender, or populations or graphics cards. No thing is the best for all, put the pretention exists, and companies are living off it.
Lastly, every publication chooses it's audience, if the audience is known to be volatile, you can't blame the audiance for it's attitude. Choose your audience more wisely. You can always change the publication you work for (in principle), just pick one with an audience you'd prefer to work for.
