A practical workaround here is to avoid relying on WordPress’s native comment pagination when the goal is to consistently show the newest reviews on page 1. For WooCommerce, an AJAX “Load More Reviews” approach can be a much cleaner solution: load the first 20 newest reviews initially, then fetch the next batch only when the visitor requests more.
This also avoids loading hundreds or thousands of reviews at once, which can improve page performance while keeping the review section intuitive. Before implementing it, I’d test the solution against WooCommerce’s review queries, review counts, sorting, pagination URLs, and caching to make sure the displayed count always matches the actual reviews in the database.
The key is fixing the query/pagination logic rather than modifying WordPress core files.
