All reviews online need to be treated as if it could be fake news. Remember there are people like JTprocaddie that literally can be bought and paid to say anything a manufacture wants them to say.
There is certainly some truth to this. I am typically suspect of glowing reviews, meaning that they are from inexperienced folks who are just too impressed to have a critical eye or are from people who may actually be involved in the promotion of the product in some manner. I have had the opportunity to handle a lot of thermal units. There are some good ones and some bad ones. Each brand/model seems to have some really neat features and each has some really boneheaded features that make you wonder what the designers were thinking when they included them. For example, when IR Defense set up their mostly easy to use menu system on their IR Hunter sights, they put the NUC and Zoom selections on different menu pages. These are the two most common features used on the scope and you have to flip around through the settings to get to them - STUPID. When reviewers are able to nitpick and point out actual shortcomings or problems with the optics and not just talk about how wonderful it is, I tend to give them more credibility of doing a more balanced review.
Everybody and every review has biases. You can't get around that.
The recurring compliant is the scope won’t start up - that’s something I read a lot about with ATN scopes I’ll find some more reviews ….
This is one aspect to look for in reviews, recurring problems noted. If multiple people are noting the same issue, that may be a huge problem. The question is whether or not the issue affects your use of the product. Early on, People did not like Pulsar's mounts for various reasons. I didn't like them that much either because you needed tools to put the scope on your rifles. However, since I don't tend to move scopes between rifles, it was a non-issue for me, but wasn't for other people. A problem like not powering up, however, is apt to be a negative for everybody.