And I must say, if you, and 10 thousand others are unhappy with a games direction, yet millions love the direction, then maybe that game or company is just not for you anymore.
I must say, due to personal experience, I rather hate that line of thinking. Just because people don't care enough or don't know enough to oppose a change, it doesn't mean they're happy with it. It's the entire point of a public protest, through the most visible and direct means available, to raise awareness and drive those people that otherwise would just follow along into some kind of action. It's not a binary state of "if they're not unhappy enough to protest they must be happy", there's a significant majority of people who are not motivated enough to act either in protest or defense of a change. And while it's not for us to decide whether or not they should act, we can and should at least try to inform them of the things that are happening, that may affect them as well.
Back when Starbound was coming out of Early Access, Chucklefish dropped a sudden major change of the game's UI (the hotbar, specifically) just weeks before release. Many of us then-fans of the game tried to oppose the change as you describe it, by organizing polls on the game's forums and asking devs directly on Discord. Only a minority were happy with the change, a full third of poll participants hated it, and the majority broadly disagreed with some or most of the changed UI, very few didn't care either way. We got told that the hundreds of people in the poll "mattered little compared to the size of the playerbase", that "the change was well thought through" and "we should just give it a try and get used to it", and that maybe something will be possible with modding later.
No changes followed. Some bugs were fixed, the most glaring problems with the new design were partially amended, but there was nothing approaching the flexibility of the old design. No modding of the UI was implemented either.
I don't think it's much of a data point, but none of us resorted to review-bombing then, at least to my knowledge. In all honesty, with the benefit of hindsight, perhaps we should have. I left an honest negative review on the game well after the fact, after it became clear no changes were forthcoming, and it was lost in the usual noise, much like our regular complaints fell on deaf ears.
One may argue that the game succeeded well enough with the change, but there's no way to know now whether it's because or despite it. The original design was an extended variation of the traditional 10-slot hotbar adjusted for dual-wielding, while the new one was made to appeal more to action-platforming rather than building and exploration, the two things the game was ostensibly about. All I know now is that despite years of trying to come back to play the game, I always end up fighting the clunky UI more than the in-game enemies.
