A new report details how a PR firm paid off critics to post positive reviews of 2018 drama Ophelia on Rotten Tomatoes, prompting scrutiny over the reviews aggregator.
Not really. Up until recently, most of the MCU was good to great. I'm not exactly sure where the shift happened, but a lot of the more recent ones have been trash. I'm talking about the secret invasions and black widows, where they've completely lost the script.
It already started slightly before Endgame - both Ant-Man and the Wasp, as well as Captain Marvel, weren't great. After Endgame though it definitely fell off completely.
Kinda like season 7 and 8 of Game of Thrones. During season 7 we still had some hope left...
However entertaining and fun the MCU has been at times, I'd say they've clearly gotten away with a lot when it comes to movie making. Like there are plenty of films in that franchise/cinematic-universe that just wouldn't have cut it and would have died on the scrap heap as stand alone films. But the MCU glow kept them alive and folded them into the giant stream of MCU content.
Beyond that, I'd bet that the post-endgame stuff has been done objectively badly ... like you could break it down into a number of poor movie/franchise making choices (like you can't simply build a story out of "a multiverse", it isn't a character or plot idea, you need more). Love and Thunder was an awful film. Can anyone tell which characters are part of the story and which are being written out any more? Etc etc.
It's all still popular though. Beyond that, your argument is a strawman ... the MCU can be a give away (because, IMO, it has clearly made a number of missteps) without the question of popularity v quality being an issue.