What you are experiencing is the efforts of boutique gear dealers trying to carve out some space for themselves vs. Guitar Center and Sweetwater. Some of these boutique dealers (current and former) developed a flair for writing online posts that used colorful language to disparage perfectly good equipment for sale at the big boxes. They attracted followings who, trying to look as savvy, would parrot back these conclusions in the absence of a proper controlled A/B comparison in their own studios. This built on itself until...
You get bizarre comments like "UA gear all sucks."
There is a funny thread over on the mastering forum where everyone starts by accepting that the UA 2192 converter is too colored for use in mastering, and then someone comes up with an oversampled RMS test and reveals that the UA actually outperformed all the other high-end contestants in accuracy!
I have no idea man, try it out, it has never failed me...yes it's my local produce but I don't have anything more than distant acquaintances at the company. I can verify that the products are absolutely high-end and credible. On the digital side the UAD plugins speak for themselves.
And yes I happily buy stuff from GC Pro, Sweetwater as well as the boutique dealers alike. Different, not necessarily better.