This is harder than it sounds because the bottom of the market is often well below a minimum viable level, to the point that you're actively making learning harder for yourself if you go there. You might not feel the difference between $100 and $1000 shoes, but Walmart has $15 shoes which are probably bad enough they make it harder to start running and learn proper technique.

I've experienced this pretty directly with skis. If you get the cheapest boots and skis you can, you'll find it harder to learn, to the point where your feet hurt at the end of the day. I pretty much associated skiing with pain until I got decent equipment. There is a level above which it isn't worth spending as a beginner, but it's a level that looks high to people on the outside.

These days, I don't look for the cheapest tool I can find, I look for the cheapest tool people seriously use—which is often 5–10 times more expensive than the cheapest option. I've had enough experiences in the past sabotaging my own progression with awful tools that I know it's not worth it.