I think whey google deranking a lot of affiliate sites nowadays is not how many adsense das or affiliate products you have on your site, the issue is deeper , way deeper my friend.
Look at these high ranking big affiliate sites like Wirecutter (whas this not a squarespace site?) ok, you see these big sites have a lot of videos, they have a team, they buying the products first then make a video about it, showing the product in detail, benefits, pros and cons , etc,etc.......and they have comments enabled on their site ( seo signals), this is a high quality trustworthy affiliate site.
Then look at the most affiliate sites from people like you and me who are starting from scratch, without have money to buy products first. I not judge you I show you the difference here.
You have content on your site, images of that product, maybe on amazon product video, that's it. In that situation you can't compare to these big affiliate high quality sites, this is why they rank high in google and a lot of "normal" low quality affiliate sites not. And the bis sites have a lot of external backlinks too.
You must go "sideway" to win in affiliate race; build up a list yes. Go into obscure niches who are not conquered by these big sites or media news sites, or on digital prodct niches where you can have a free trial test the product and make a video of it.
Thes eare you opportunities when you can't buy products first.
Another Sideway is using only a landing page to collect newsletter sign ups and using for your content FB share it to related FB groups or on Linkedin and Tumblr too without have own website, or have a youtube channel. Or blogging on reddit (yeah but I don't kno whow doing that) with that path you ging the sideway and you will be more flying under the google seo algo hits radar, to start making your first decent side hustle money before you go on with your own website and own services/products.
The best idea is go the sideway path or have your own services on your selhost website- here write infomational content and have a comment section enabled in wordpress to get social signals/ seo signals. Have a good EEAT, and syndicate a different written summary from your content to social media or others.
Or you can try be a news site who can write from all the news a different story, you will get traffic have an email sign up on each article/ category page, have sections where you have adsense ads or affiliate product ads.
What I observed the last months with that google HCU algo is, google prefers ranking faster/indexing faster brand domain names , short fantasy names whatsoever, not personal names.(bing as opposite like personal name domains) .
That means google will ranking or indexing faster the jsmith(com) domain- not the jdonaldsmith(com) domain. I can't explain why.
But there is another thing I saw, that new sites who have not many pages, having lousy content, but have a similar domain name /website name (site title) outranking you! Like this example; your site is jsmith(com) , the new lousy competitor has a domain similar to you like: hjsmith(com) , that will be dangerous, then you need to buy a lot of domains with name variations and com tld extension to fight against it with a 301 redirect to your main site.
So long as the hjsmith(com) competitor is in different niche like you and have another site title name like you, then you should be fine.
