> buggy, default telnet passwords, silly vulnerabilities, crashing ActiveX plugins

This pretty much happens with any equipment. If it's very cheap there's no reasonable expectation that they put too much effort into building and maintaining it. If it's expensive there may be other interests involved.

The difference is what your nationalism dictates: When you hear of a Huawei vulnerability you think "spying", and when you hear of a Cisco one (or five [0]) you think "bug". In the end the choice is to buy cheap and have all the careless bugs, or to buy expensive and only have the by design ones. And whether you think they are malicious or not depends on where you come from relative to the product.

[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cisco-backdoor-hardcoded-a...