Why have I only heard of maybe 2 of those press release links? It just looks like a lot of paid spam.
It is....it's the result of a paid press release from an low-end PR agency. A few hundred bucks gets your story listed on literally 100s of sites that are run by the agency, and that almost no-one ever sees. The list looks impressive, though, and it helps slightly with Google rankings, though Googles algorithms try to exclude this sort of padding.