One week from now will be the third anniversary of this thread, and still nothing.
All it would take would be to change "Reviews are shared with developers and your followers" to "Reviews are shared ONLY with developers and your followers".
Viewing post in Wait, that's how reviews work here?
"I just wonder if this is in the backlog or what’s taking focus instead"
It's likely neither. I'm pretty sure the devs of the website just don't care about the user experience. We still don't even have an actual way to exclude tags when browsing, and that feature has been requested multiple times for years. All we have now is a shitty band-aid solution of manually adding some stuff to the URL to exclude a single tag.
I suggest using a bookmark to apply the band-aid.
If you are on Chrome, I made a button for that band-aid, to be auto-applied. And if you can run tampermonkey, I made a script to hide games by their main genre. And another script to hide individual games/developers by pressing a key.
A roadmap of features to come sure would be nice to look at. But maybe they do not want to commit, in case features have to be scratched or postponed. Last was some search optimisations and it was said, they are still working on it, but not what future changes are to be expected.
The wording should be more clear, yes, absolutely.
But reviews are not only shared with developers and followers. They appear in https://itch.io/feed?filter=ratings
The "problem" is, that they are not attached to a game. But while this should be obvious, if you looked at any game at all and could not see any reviews, people still misunderstand the wording when writing a review.