The consensus, from what I can tell, is that more established and traditional voices in the tech community are rather upset that younger and lesser-known reviewers and YouTubers were given access to the phone and able to publish their reviews on Monday. The more established, mainstream crowd was able to publish on Tuesday, with most outlets having had the phone for anywhere from a week to as little as 24 hours.
The upset, although I’ve not seen it written explicitly, seems to be that the traditional crowd feel better equipped to provide a critical analysis of Apple’s new flagship, product-line altering product.
And, although that’s true, it’s worth bearing in mind that Apple’s goal isn’t for you to produce a multi-thousand word treatise about the Face ID mechanism for your audience of people who are statistically most likely to have already pre-ordered the product.
Marketing is meant to drive sales. Plain and simple. I trust the words written by the core 12 Apple Bloggers but my 20 year old sister has never heard of them. Nothing about how iPhone X was marketed is surprising. It doesn’t mean that I’m not a little disappointed that I have to wait a few weeks for the reviews I care about.