I haven't played the game, so I can't give my personal opinion on the exploration, maybe the reviewer did legit like it. Though after looking at the reviewer on IGN, it looks like they probably sacked him or something, because he only wrote one other review, and hasn't done anything on there since 2018.
IGN does have several reviewers, which can lead to conflicting opinions for various games in the same genre. I personally find it harder to criticize IGN for conflicting opinions because they have say, 20 people reviewing all the FPS games over a several year period. It's more understandable to complain about conflicting reviews when it comes to a Youtube reviewer where it's the same guy doing all the reviews. So it makes more sense to me to complain about if Angry Joe said Doom 2016 was a 7.1/10 not innovative enough, but the new carbon copy COD game is a 10/10 GOTY material, versus IGN doing that when 2 different people reviewed both games. As much as I find the "7.8/10 too much water" review on Pokemon Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire hilariously bad, the 9.8/10 review on the original was written by a completely different person.
So instead of treating IGN as a singular entity, you could treat it as a network of people. So Joe Schmoe on IGN knows his shit, I trust that guy's reviews, but Bob Someone on there is an idiot, he doesn't know his controller from his ass. Basically the same way we treat different Youtube reviewers.
I probably didn't do a good job explaining before I started ranting, but it was more to do with you basically saying IGN are shills for giving near perfect scores for AAA games that are really generic, and how games that are praised now were games that IGN got called out for handing out shill reviews years ago.
Idk, I started seeing more Skyward Sword fans crawling out the woodworks when BOTW came out. Usually when opinions shift on games, a big reason is when a lot of the people who grew up on those games get old enough to become the majority age group for the "general consensus". Skyward Sword is 10 years old now, and in another 5-10 years, more people who grew up on it will become the majority to praise the game. I've been playing Zelda for 25 years, and I saw the shift in praise for the 3 home console titles between OOT and Skyward Sword shift from trash to amazing as those games kept getting older.