How do you research a new place before staying there? And what sources do you find useful?

Hi everyone

I love exploring different cities, going to local cafes (can’t live without coffee), parks, places where people gather. I am very into no-touristy areas that show the real life of a city. This is both my love to traveling and professional interest in how the city and life within it are built (I am an architect and urbanist)

When I travel, I have two strategies of place selection:

• Quick and cheap strategy ( I use for short term trips, and it is definitely not a flawless one) I try to juggle with different parameters like: price and quality of an apartment, proximity to downtown, touristy attractions and subway stations (so when you are already in the city, you walk around and start to exploring and learning about the city from scratch)
• Long-term and expensive (when looking for a place to stay up to at least a year) This one is only based on my personal experience. For example, right now I am planning to move to Europe. And in order to choose a place that fits me and not get into the blind lottery with a couple new cities I have in my “within the budget” list of locations, I made short trips there, walked these cities up and down, asked locals what it's like to live there and juxtaposed their responses with personal impressions.

Eventually, I don't really use any youtubes, blogs, ratings, or forums and thematic chats. Because they are either inconvenient and time consuming relative to the quality of information I could get or they are just neither informative nor objective.

Below is a bit more context to my question (skip it if it feels unnecessary)

I came to the conclusion that there is no source/platform about the cities, besides my own experience and the experiences of my friends, that I personally find useful and informative. The kind of source, where at one place I could explore how different cities and their neighborhoods are experienced, and how it is to live there.

First I came to this thought from an urbanism and city management perspective (one more topic to discuss, but not in this subreddit) after a bit of searching and thinking through I noticed that this kind of problem kinda exists in general and topics like travelling, moving and relocation, I believe, are affected the most.

P.S. Honestly, I would want to have a place that gathers the understanding and knowledge of what it's like to live in different cities and areas. And maybe there is this magic website (please tell me about it) but it never found me.

And just one more thing I am curious about.
Once you have spent some time in a new place, how different is the reality from the expectations and gathered knowledge you had before arriving?