The problem is that no one is bothering to give you an alternative because they can't make money out of it.
Let's say I want to do a '10 best bikes for under $1,000' article. How am I going to do that well without actually going out and buying 10 bikes and being prepared to make hardly anything in return?
That kind of article is trash anyway, they should limit it to 3 or 5 bikes not 10. Many best "auto" reviews simply have a category so they dont piss off any one auto manufacture.
Even if you look for the top 10 trucks, they will end up showing all the major brands, because they will break it down for: 4x4, extended cab, full size, mid size, ...
Lists are mostly garbage because you dont care about the top 25, you really only need to know the best item and the next best at a certain budget
If Google deindexed the spam, that effort might actually be worth it for a bike shop to do an honest comparison. But so long as you’re just going to get buried by SEO spam, why bother?
While that would improve things I still think it's rather unlikely that a bike shop would be willing to give anything but a great rating for the bikes the are selling. And if they are their suppliers might not like it. There's still a dependency.
At the end of the day being shortsighted doesnt matter. They are a publicly traded company that pays their top employees in options. If the problem of spam becomes too difficult they will focus on milking the cow until it dies just like every other massive company that came before it.
Google is not that short sighted. They know that if people stop trusting it to give good results then they'll lose their market.
I suspect the problem is just harder than it seems.