As for film critics, I have no trust in their opinions anymore. Anyone can become a professional critic. Granted, the audience score often isn’t a good metric, either, but I only think it counts as “review bombing” if it’s being done for reasons unrelated to the quality of the film itself. Maybe a lot of those people hated TLJ for the wrong reasons, but those were still the genuine opinions of people.
I get what you mean, but I heavily disagree with the TLJ audience score representing the “real opinions of people”. There was clearly at least a bit of manipulation going on to make the score as negative as possible: people using bots to spam multiple negative reviews at once, people who hadn’t even seen the movie rating it negatively because their favorite culture war grifter told them to, that sort of thing. Again, I know TLJ was controversial, but “40% on Rotten Tomatoes” controversial? That seems suspicious.
Of course, why all that vitriol was directed toward TLJ specifically, while TFA mostly got off scot-free, I’ll never understand.
Like I said before, it’s because “white male nerd outrage” wasn’t anywhere near as big of a thing prior to Trump getting nominated. There were still right-wing grifter channels back then, and they did hate TFA, but the idea of “anti-wokeness” wasn’t really mainstream yet. Luckily, the grifters sank back into obscurity once more after the Capitol riot failed, but the pollution of movie discourse that they started still persists.