A sound engineer is not necesairly one with an egineering education. Many come from the musical side of the music bussiness, certainly today. I worked for years freelance as engineer, in the live circuit (mainly dj soudsystems and big festivals), radio (broadcast and live concerts on air) and as recording and mixing engineer (mostly hired by the artist themselves) with no formal eduction in engineering or sound at all. I'm a school dropout who learned most of the stuff i do myself. I'm a former bass and cello player (can't play anymore because of broken hand), producer (largely electronic music) and dj, and came from that side into sound engineering. Here in Belgium formal training as sound engineer was almost no existing untill the start of the 21st century, you learned it on the job, starting at the bottom.
Now i work in ICT (due to back problems) and also there i have no formal training, only diy knowledge.
The problem is that in audio there are endless sliding scales of "qualifications." I debated what "Professional" means with John Atkinson on another forum when people refer to equipment reviewers, such as myself, as "professional reviewers." In the US, a professional is anyone who gets paid to do their job. In Canada, a professional belongs to a "profession" such as teaching, medicine, law, etc. A teacher belongs to a professional body and a teacher can lose their job if they act unprofessionally. They will go in front of a board and can lose their license. Thus, in the USA you can be hired because your buddy is the editor of The Absolute Sound not because you belong to a profession.
Being a reviewer or recording engineer has no "professional body" or series of standards - anyone can be a reviewer and anyone can be a recording engineer. You will ultimately be judged by your readership and the musicians who employ you to record or master their material. If you are good you will get more clients. If you're not you won't.
And the better you are, the bigger the acts that you will get. When Brad Pitt reopened Miravel Studios he could pretty much hire anyone in the world - he hired Damian Quintard.
I digress. The car reviewer, the speaker or amplifier reviewer, the camera reviewer, and the coffee machine reviewer do not need to be an "engineer" since the reviewer isn't designing these things. Their job is to evaluate how good the product is relative to other similarly priced items - they evaluate the end-user experience. Does the coffee taste good - yes or no - if not it's a bad machine no matter what technical prowess or complexity of design exists in the machine. A mechanic or engineer may be able to write 12 white papers on how great the engine and transmission are but you don't need to be an engineer to determine if the thing is gutless in 3rd gear or if the seats are as comfortable as a brick. For audio, the ears are the only arbiter of quality - this tonmeisters, musicians, classical composers, mastering engineers, and generally people with perfect pitch and/or perfect relative pitch, etc. Again it doesn't matter one iota whether a speaker is using a silk dome tweeter or a ribbon or AMT or a BE. It matters to design and marketing perhaps just as pointless features in a car matter so that they have "something to sell" as a "feature." The end result - does speaker A make this piano sound more like a piano than B? If yes then all the technobabble in the world isn't going to make speaker B sound better than A.
A recording engineer like Damian Quintard or Steve Hoffman does not need to know how the mixing board is designed and whether the caps are Dueland or Mundorf. He does not need to know how to design and build a mixing board from the ground up. His job is to use different mixing boards and choose the best.
Most people tend to cast a wide net for reviews - which is why Rotten Tomatoes exists. That site takes 100s of reviews to get an overall score - 90% of critics like a movie then it's "probably" going to be a good movie. Of course, you could always be in the 10% group who doesn't like it but such is the world of statistics.
Thus one can look at the following parameters when it comes to speakers for audiophiles (the people who care more about home sound quality)
1) Sales to audiophiles (does it sell to people who care most about audio reproduction of music)
2) Length of time the speaker has sold (longevity)- many speakers sell for a while - then have big sales and get replaced. If the speaker was good in 2000 it should still be good in 2025.
3) Is it well-reviewed by experienced reviewers around the world in a multitude of magazines (also factoring in number 2)
4) Does the speaker have crossover appeal in that a wide section of people with varying listening preferences and backgrounds like the speakers? Musicians, composers, audiophiles, reviewers, REs, Mastering Engineers. A cross-section of people willing to pay premium dollars for such a speaker having heard the competition? It's one thing to come out with a flashy new product and sell it for a few years and discontinue it. I think it's another matter to sell for over 30 years and after all that time you can't keep up with demand.