It's less about being "smarter," it's really about identifying your advantage and understanding whether you can exploit it. This could be something as obvious as an information advantage (insider trading) to simply having more time/patience. If you can buy and hold for decades, you can wait out the bumps, the people who are forced to sell, and for more money to enter the market.
I think the key difference is the audience. For a lot of food bloggers that share their recipes, the initial group of readers is loyal fans. They want to hear the stories and the recipe is almost secondary.
When you find a recipe through search, you want the recipe and have to wade through the story and the photos to get to it and that's frustrating. Oddly enough, it's also what may help that article rank higher in search too.
As someone who has been quoted by major news outlets in what's likely a similar fashion - adding color to the story rather than reporting news - there is rarely "vetting" and the fact checking that occurs is merely confirming that what the journalist wrote matched what I said. They don't try to find additional sources to corroborate the story.
So the fact checking focused on the surveys conducted, the methodology, etc - not whether Drew Cloud was a real person.
(Also, I'm a real person so it's possible they do this type of vetting and I never experienced it because... well, I'm real)
Another benefit of publicly sharing your learning is that if you misinterpreted or misremembered something, others can point it out so you don't go through life with incorrect ideas.
FWIW, that fluff is what builds a relationship with readers and for a lot of food blogs that's what separates you from powerhouses like seriouseats. You can usually just jump down to the recipe card if you want to skip the fluff.
It's because most people don't take 45+ minutes so they don't know the difference. In 10-20min you just have soft brown onions... but once you truly caramelize, you know it's totally different.
For 100% passive, you really can't beat this. Funnel your cash into dividend stocks and now you have a stream of income that's taxed at a favorable rate too. Even if you were to go with an S&P 500 index fund you get a near 2% yield.
They can do this but then companies will ask fake reviewers to buy the product through Amazon and then reimburse. The seller is only out the commission + price of product - it would create a small hurdle but wouldn't solve the problem.