This.
When VAR was introduced I said that it would show whether English referees had previously been incompetent or corrupt. There can be no doubt now that most, if not all, PL referees are corrupt. As
@noodlehair says, they were never as bad as they are now, despite now having the tools to eliminate 99% of bad calls.
I've posted the link to the Clattenberg interview in a few threads today where he gives a direct example of being corrupt during a premier league game and explains how it is quite normal to referee a game to the narrative or outcome you want, rather than according to the rules. Anyone thinking it can't or doesn't happen is just kidding themselves since that point. We've been told by a premier league referee that this is how it works. He wasn't investigated for it. No one came out and denied it. It's unchallenged evidence.
Corrupt might be a strong word but if you are a football referee and actively choose to not correctly or fairly enforce the rules of football, I don't know what other word there is for it? Derranged?
What VAR has done like you have said is expose how bad the problem really is. Before an error could be down to a referee not seeing the incident clearly. Now the implementation of VAR has all but removed that.
So instead we now have rules being re-written or interpreted wrongly mid game to explain away wrong decisions in spite of clear video evidence being available. A problem referees have only coincidentally started suffering from since the exact point that VAR was introduced. Amazing as far as coincidences go.
Every time a rule has to be re-interpreted to explain away a wrong decision, it then creates a string of other wrong decisions where there is no longer a correct way to interpret that rule, since the officials have told everyone that the wrong way to interpret it is in fact the right way, which means making the right decision is now wrong and making the wrong decision is supposedly right but is also obviously wrong to anyone with common sense and working eyes.
I think they've created a massive fecking mess and are trying to dig their way out of it. Instead of using VAR to start officiating to the rules instead of to narratives, they've tried to carry on as was and its spiralling downwards.
