I don't get why this is controversial. Isnt sponsoring influencers like this pretty normal?

TFA identifies the error which seems to have led to a situation of irritated reviewers as well as "influencers" (freelance marketers):

> Team Pixel should have never been treated as a reviews program in the first place. It’s always been a marketing play for Google.

Pixels are great devices. I think stating this so matter of factly is a bit unbelievable.

Many of my close friends and myself that have used Android phones have sworn off the Pixel brand.

Personally I had issues with GPS and the speaker on my Gen 1 pixel.

We all seem to run into hardware faults right around the end of the warranty period and their value seems to drop like a rock on the second-hand market months after launch.

Just my anecdotes.

I owned several generations of Pixel. Nightmare. Half baked software. Sometimes would crash on first setup. Just a spaghetti mess which you can't afford with something so central to daily life as a phone. It was like some kind of academic software experiment. They literally couldn't pay me to use one today even as a second phone. I don't trust google.

I started on pixel 1 and now have a pixel 4a. My wife has been thru multiple pixels as well (3 and 7). We've had zero issues.