Thanks for your explanations. I'll try to seek out those lists that detail things further as well. I had to skip over the whole of Battlefield 4, so I wasn't following things at the time. But I also wonder whether the growth of social platforms and the period where Battlefield 4 needed a lot of post-launch work coincided in a way that's had a long lasting effect. Starting around then, a game developer engages with the platforms both as an investment and to forge relationships with players, and the players who contribute to those platforms have a space to state their opinions. That's mutually beneficial, and it sounds like that worked out well with Battlefield 4.
But I do think it can result in a kind of feedback loop, for example where a person who makes YouTube videos browses Reddit for a sense of opinion and then emphasizes that opinion in their videos, which are then reproduced on Reddit or elsewhere, which returns to reinforce the YouTube person as an arbiter of broad opinions despite that they are drawn from a select source. When millions of people buy a game I have a hard time considering a subreddit to be a representative community, though at the same time if some part of a game is objectively broken I can also imagine a shared overall agreement about its need to be improved. I dunno!
The dynamic of interaction between developer/community manager and players is interesting though as an avenue to incorporate feedback. It didn't exist centuries ago when games came in a box and that was it, and I'm always curious now to see how/which feedback influences ongoing shifts in the lifespan of a game.