Is content inside comments treated differently in regards to SEO? (word page count)

I am thinking about adding a review plugin to my site so that users can rate and review products.
I am running a wordpress site and would use a plugin that adds a star rating to the wordpress comment form.

My intuition tells me that Google will treat comment content differently than editorial content, right?
Would you say comments are a lower form of content in the eyes of Google? I have no info to back it up, but it just seems reasonable to me to put more weight on the article content.. Or what are your experiences?

If yes, I think a good alternative would be to manually approve all comments and then just copy paste them at the end of the article. This way I'd just append comments to the end of my main content and not actually use the comment form to display anything. The comment form would just be there for review submissions..

It depends on the keywords you're optimizing

If you're targeting very low traffic, low competition keywords, you'd be surprised how well comments work

Yes I have also had some good experience using comments as a review system in the past.
I think it helped with rankings, probably because it works as a social signal if you get a lot of comments.

Btw, do you mean comment content that is SEO optimized or do you mean comments for linkbuilding?

From the case studies I've read it definitely helps:

This one says concludes definite benefits to comments and rankings:
https://www.shoutmeloud.com/blog-comments-effect-search-engine-ranking.html


This one found 16% of total search traffic coming in from comments alone.
https://www.quicksprout.com/2014/10...ase-your-search-traffic-a-data-driven-answer/

I believe Google treats content in comments as a part of the whole page content. User-generated content (reviews, comments) is especially useful for making nearly duplicate pages more unique. That's why all ecommerce sites encourage their customers to write reviews under the products they bought. Of course, you have to moderate comments if you don't want them to turn into a trash can.