Here is the major issue. We have a lot of "affiliate marketers" who create subpar content on themes that are truly not that good. They go and grab whatever theme will sell well and hope that they turn a profit. A lot of the themes that they recommend are most of the time garbage. They will say top 150 WordPress themes and fill it with 150 affiliate links. However, the themes are very low quality.

For instance, many of the themes that they claim are SEO optimized are not. You see many of them missing the schema markup or none at all! Then there are ones with no proper Breadcrumb integration. The two main themes in SEO and they miss them

They still rank well on Google because the sites themselves are popular, in fact, the smaller websites tend to have better content, and recommendations, but they rank lower because they don't receive the traffic that most of the larger websites are. Designrazzi is borderline pathetic with the quality of content. Yet, they have a huge following and are top on Google.

It is clear to me that they are not putting any effort into their lists and are instead just trying to rank on long tail keywords. It is annoying as they are almost a guide for a lot of webmasters and they create poor content that can be made in 5 minutes.