I'm releasing a game here this month and was setting up my page, decided to have a look at the partner & affiliates list to see if it should put my game into the system where they are able to download the game for free. However, looking at the list many (at least recently) have almost no following and a number of them have invalid websites and i even found a few that provide no references at all meaning they just said that they write reviews, provided a fake website and they were approved. What's going on here?

There is an affiliate system on itch? Like with curators reviewing games and such? Where?

Is this a new feature or an old and abandoned concept? Because reviews are not really very public. Actually, there are no reviews at all. Not like on Steam. You cannot go to a game page and read reviews for a game.

In theory there could be "influencers", non game developers, with many followers on itch. When they would rate a game, that comment would appear in the feed of their followers. I have yet to encounter such a thing on itch. If itch does promote such a system, they do it very silently, or maybe I have not looked in the right places.