At first I thought this was a disappointing scandal and then I realized it wasn't.
What confused me was the word kickback by the Wirecutter business team. If they'd said affiliate fee, which is what they really meant, then it would have fit perfectly with my model of what they do. That model is review products as best as they can and make money through affiliate fees.
I'd never thought through the edge cases of that affiliate model before since almost everything I look up on the WireCutter has an Amazon link. If the product they recommend is on Amazon, then getting the affiliate payment is straightforward. But if the product they end up recommending isn't on Amazon, then, yeah, I guess they have to approach the company about setting up an affiliate payment. The problem there though is that The Wirecutter has no leverage if they actually do practice editorial independence. If you were NextDesk, why would you say yes?
What bothers me is that NextDesk is using a PR pattern that I find predatory. It's preying on the fact that I wouldn't have time to think critically. So NextDesk has jumped on this word "kickback" which obscures that the actual accusation is not airtight. But because kickback sounds so bad, I'm inclined to believe NextDesk. In other words, I find that post manipulative and I don't like it.
The meat of the scandal though has two sides with a much less clear cut answer:
A) On one hand, the NextDesk got downgraded. Possibly as punishment.
B) On the other hand, as explained by The WireCutter, it was downgraded because of a new option that was half as much.
I tend to believe B because I find that The Wirecutter is consistently price sensitive. Overly so in my mind.