My experience is Wirecutter recommended process products most of the time, and isn't very clueful in how it evaluates them. It's that's Sharper Image vibe.
Best air filter would use standard home furnace filters. Those are cheap and good enough. Most of the money should be on the fan. High efficieny, high load, low noise fans are expensive.
The Wirecutter model is to take what Consumer Reports reports used to do and eliminate all the hard parts like actually learning the science behind the product, performing serious long-term evaluations, and building funky stress testing machines. (And the big one, not accepting advertiser dollars.)
What's left? Some underqualified millenials doing a bunch of Googling, buying some products off Amazon, chatting about them on a Slack thread, and then summarizing all the anecdata using no fewer than 10000 referral-generating words.
Suffice it to say I find their recommendations basically useless. And in several cases aggressively wrong, like they recommend a product I know from personal experience to be among the worst in its category.
You've got people like Project Farm over on YT. He does really good, rigourous stuff. He did a test on wiper blades where tested them new, then left them on the roof of his house in the sun for a full year, and then did all the tests again. He also rarely states firm conclusions, just presents objective data. The only real exception is when one, or a few products standout as either exceptionally good (especially when they're NOT the most expensive) or they do so poorly as to be totally unfit for purpose or even unsafe.
The products he reviews tend to be sort of workshop oriented (tools - from basic open end wrenches up to fairly capable welders and chainsaws, lubricants, that kind of thing), but he's also done a fair bit of automotive stuff, jeans, gloves, and things like that.'
For the jeans, he tested stuff like puncture force (with a nail), abrasion resistance, belt loop strength, and breathability. He also commented on but did not score fit and comfort.
Project Farm is good, but it's still mostly entertainment. You have to know how to filter out the things that matter versus the things that are more just for amusement, and whether the stated test is a "good test".
I consider that a feature, not a bug. Different people have different priorities. That's part of what went wrong with Consumer Reports... they started leaning too much on sort of softer things like "noise" and "vibration" and gimmicky features with limited utility, while deemphasizing wether the thing is worth a damn at the task it's supposed to do in the first place.
I really appreciate Project Farm's reviews, and regularly watch them, but I often wish he had more of an engineering background. Some of the tests he comes up with fall in the worthless to downright misleading category. Not a lot of them, but enough that I wish there were someone more rigorous making these videos.
> Suffice it to say I find their recommendations basically useless.
This is a are in general that has become pretty useless over the last years - the shills have won out. I'd go so far as to say that on average the first few pages of any web search for product advice result in negative value overall.
Best air filter would use standard home furnace filters. Those are cheap and good enough. Most of the money should be on the fan. High efficieny, high load, low noise fans are expensive.