I wonder if they record less than 5 stars if the user doesn't submit the text box, or if their research says everyone has great quality because they close/decline to provide feedback.
Qualitative research is finicky like that. What I’ve seen happen more often is a user is frustrated yet professional enough in some moment to actually provide useful feedback, but they bail when the survey has one too many questions. UXR teams like to organize questions and answers into nice little spreadsheets that ladder back to KPIs, but that’s not how an emotional person with honest criticism wants to share it. So they bail and you lose that moment. I like to do stars or thumb up/down as a pulse check, then a textbox to spill your guts. More work for me, but useful results more often.
The thread is fishing for some kind of moral failure, but if it's the company gathering those opinions, without any obligation, for its own use, it's not hostile behavior to manipulate the data.
It's just stupid.
(There may be, of course, some behavior that is hostile to the company done by people inside it. But it's not hostile to you. Also, one can argue that "stupid" is worse.)
