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There was a good writeup about that, years ago, probably in Russian, that I can't find now. Basically it's that niche journalism, and especially platforms like Kotaku and Polygon, is just testing grounds for Big Boy journalism, a place to polish and prove your wordcel technical chops and lack of squeamishness in producing essay-like content on a given topic. It's like being a technical writer before becoming Ted Chiang or Neal Stephenson – only an uninspired one. Would you, as an aspiring wordsmith, want to dedicate your life to anime reviews or video games, or do you hope to grow up into an Atlantic or New Yorker superstar who's paid well, gets invited to parties with Important People, and makes the world a better place with his blathering? Not much of a question, is it. And accordingly, many game journalists have disdain for their effectively captive audience with those infantile interests; and extreme distaste for more grassroots commentary that chips away at their relevance.
The same logic partially applies to creatives (writers and even designers) in big name studios.
Some links:
https://crappygames.miraheze.org/wiki/Blog:Top_10_Worst_Things_Game_Journalists_Have_Ever_Done
https://old.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/cjs1g3/worst_game_journalist_moments/
But as for the specifics of the transition from enthusiasts to careerists – that's harder. Maybe it has something to do with the dynamics of publishing houses buying gamers' outlets.
Another aspect is that AAA games have become inherently more «soulless», and the same is true for movies. The latter can be partially quantified by paying attention to the share of expenditure that goes towards advertising. Inflation-adjusted advertisement costs seem to be stable. Production costs are only stable or growing if we don't adjust for inflation, like here. The obvious inference is that studios are becoming more reliant on advertisement (I suspect there are better sources on this), which must have corrupting influence on the reviewer/moviegoer ecosystem. An in games: for example, bloggers must compete for receiving pre-release access to publish their piece ahead of time and get their share of clicks in the fast-moving attention economy, so they've got to be on good terms with studios. Concrete case of how this turns out in practice: meh game Metroid Dread getting 88% on Metacritic with 124 reviews, while the crowning achievement of the genre, Hollow Knight has 90% with 27 reviews (recently it was 87% with the same review count, I have a screenshot; not sure what changed).
Now there's also a concerted effort to «groom» fanbases, build franchises... the structure of movie industry as an environment for producing art, even just mass commercial art, is unraveling into streamlined revenue pipelines. But that's the normal stuff of a hyper-optimized economy (I think there was a good substack post on that).
There's an alternative, maybe parallel take to this I think. J-school has been horrible for journalism across the board. It's that, instead of being Subject Matter Experts, be that Subject Matter anything from local politics to tech or whatever, people are just taught how to write more broadly. It's become an upward mobile, hierarchal structure, at least much more than it was in the past.
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One of the great blackpills about the whole GamerGate thing was the realization that "if they're going to do this just for vidya, how corrupt is Serious Journalism?" Then 2016 happened, then 2020, and you know all the rest.
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I know more than a few people who have been Finnish games journalists and never really have showed an interest in other forms of journalism. Some of them of course moved on to other non-journalism-related jobs, but that's pretty much expected from a low-paying field like games journalism.
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