The biggest thing that's holding me back from purchasing a domain and starting is that I want to be profitable but I also want to be authentic. I feel like in order for me to be authentic and do product reviews, I actually have to purchase the product and give hands on reviews. I look at others within my possibly chosen niche giving unboxing reviews on YouTube, I can't compete with that nor can I afford that. My research based reviews where I look at 1 star 3 star 5 star reviews and pretend I know what I am talking about aren't going to cut it in my opinion. It's an insecurity/integrity problem.
Okay, you have a few dilemmas' here to smooth out. First of all, please understand that doing affiliate stuff with the reviews model is typically not where a newbie begins due to the mindset that eventually occurs from planning it. You have entered this mindset. Marketing is not the result of someone sampling products. Marketing is the process of bringing a specific action by a person you have attracted to your means of marketing. Now, of course, this can be doing reviews, but as you have noted, it causes you to think about how to provide that which you cannot provide, an honest first hand review. More on this at a later time.
What I recommend for you, and any newbie, is to start small and simple. This is due to y9our needing to learn the basics of our business before expanding into more comprehensive and demanding models. I highly recommend you decide to promote offers first, rather than products. Promoting offers will give you the much required experience needed to learn working with an affiliate network, working with various traffic sources, and learning to make your tracker your best friend. This is a form of affiliate marketing makes you a publisher. As a publisher you will find offers to promote and research the competitors currently succeeding with the offers and learn to mimic their funnels. You will learn to work with a variety of traffic sources and to develop the skill of refining the traffic, targeting the traffic, and blocking bad traffic. You will put your tracker to work and make it your best friend. you see, this is actually a data business. Your every effort comes with reports that tells you what is working, where it works, why it works, what traffic works, what demographics are responsive and successful, etc., etc., etc.
I recommend working with affiliate networks, offers, landers, intelligence platforms, trackers, and a variety of traffic sources before doing any affiliate programs where you are dedicating a site to reviews. Learning to be a publisher will give you a set of developed skills that will give you some credentials for applying to affiliate programs. Affiliate programs and affiliate networks are not the same animals.