That's a pretty heavy accusation to put on hundreds of people... not even including the thousands of gamers who have praised both Arceus and Elden Ring post launch. I guess they are 'astroturfed' too?
Is anything you don't like considered astroturfed if it scores above a certain number?
I have zero doubt Elden Ring is a good if not great game, but it's nowhere near the review scores. On the other hand Arceus is an absolutely objectively mediocre game besides the "better" core gameplay which is more telling of how outdated and mediocre past games design was, and if it was any other game it would be judged as clunky, limited and redundant. And of course I'm not going to come back on the horrendous graphics, visual art and design of both the world and the hisiuan pokemon, the mediocre clunky realisation, animation, interactions and so on...
BUT, YES that's how astroturfing, PR and generally behavioral marketing (group behavior especially) work: if you get enough opinion leaders and outlets spewing the same crafted messages to an audience, a big enough group of degenerates (or already sold "shills") will -parrot- exactly the same arguments, which in turns becomes a sort of fabricated public zeitgeist that is hard to debunk on the fly, until time passed and either people accept it's validity without critical judgement for some time OR...even though it's too late people quickly realize the absolute non-sense, bullshit or lie it was.
The sad thing is, the second scenario happened to Elden Ring even though overall that's a good game, while Arceus got away with something most people know deep down to be absolute never-seen before bullshit.
For having worked on a few projects which had "astroturfing" agencies hired (they are crazy heavy on the pockets because they have huge nets on PR, influence and social marketing engineering side), though I wasn't involved on the com strategy, the result was impressive and even frightening, because no regular marketing/communication strategy and budget can get you those results beyond the actual zone of truth.