In the end, what becomes apparent here is that the r/boardgames crowd is both a) a bit lighter when it comes to "gamerz" since they gravitated to whatever was considered the "hit" of the gaming world at the time and b) largely conflict-averse. By that I mean that even where competitive games made the top 3, they were often non-interactive like Wingspan or Race for the Galaxy or simply straight up co-ops. I appreciate the innovation of The Crew, but only in a crowd where conflict avoidance was a priority would you see both versions of it winning a place on the dais and the list is fairly heavy on co-ops to begin with. The major exceptions are things like Root, which is a wargame, and TI4, which is a very complex and very long game and a 4X, but also kind of occupies its own place because both of those things that are avoided by the majority of the market (long, complex) embodied by places like r/boardgames are promoted as features by both enthusiasts and the publisher. One thing that does stand out in terms of publishers is that, despite the high favor given to Stonemaier Games on r/boardgames and similar fora, only two of them made the list at all, one of them the year's biggest hit (Wingspan) and the other trying to dive back into the narrative framework in a major way (Vantage.)
What strikes me as the prevailing theme is that most of the winners are "mass market" games for gamerz. By that I mean that they're not "mass market" enough to reach the level of something like Parker Brothers classics, but they are available in places like Target, which means that they're reaching a far larger market than, say, GMT's usual output. You can see teaching your elderly parents to play Codenames or Sushi Go or even Wingspan. You're not likely to sell them on Cuba Libre.
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