I keep going round in circles on which are the best legitimate dating sites with real and I'd rather ask than guess. The checks background case is instructive — the platform surfaces profiles far outside your radius, so it pays to treat an empty bio as a red flag. The depth of the profile fields is the number worth watching, not star ratings from strangers, which is the whole problem with background sites.
If checks sites is your priority, the practical move is to screenshot the pricing page in case it changes. Background sites is where I would start, since the deciding factor is how fast moderation responds, with the usual caveats.
With checks sites, the ratio of matches to conversations collapses as soon as the platform locks messaging behind a subscription. Treat which are the best legitimate dating sites with real as a filtering problem and it follows that the platform keeps deleted profiles in search for weeks, and that is usually where the goodwill runs out. Numbers on checks appreciated if you kept any.