There was some controversy in the music tech space on YouTube because Behringer attacked a YouTuber and reviewer after he gave a product a bad review.

In fact they seem to have tightened up on free review samples in general.

I did some reviewing in the 90s and the magazine had a solid reviews policy - tell the truth even if someone pulls their advertising. Which very much happened on a few occasions.

You can do that if you have no issues with selling ad pages, which Byte clearly didn't.

Whether that was ever generally true for the industry, or is true now with YouTube influencers, is a different question.