I don't think people are buying television show ratings. Usually, when a TV show is way off the rating you'd expect, it's because it got really bad at the end of the season and critics only screen the first few episodes. For whatever reason, Rings of Power also had serious podcast energy behind it, like nerds with their own shows really wanted it to be good just to be worth talking about. This is related to the complaint from the article about RT starting to count small self-published critics. A lot of them are not really "critics" in the normal sense. They're extremely enthusiastic superfans that cover some subset of a particular genre and like virtually everything that gets made in that genre.
I have seen Rotten Tomatoes apparently just glitch out scores, too. Wheel of Time season one has 94 reviews with 64 positive, which is 68% positive, yet the tomatometer says 81%. Sometimes that is because of the episode-by-episode reviews, which are overwhelmingly from recap blogs that only cover what they like, but even in this case, that doesn't make up the difference.