“My knockoff AirPods don’t work well.”
The earpiece craze started long before. I remember my mono-audio Samsung earpiece that went into one ear and worked perfectly from a decade before Airpods. The samsung charged with a simple USB cable, too.
Technological limitations caused that to be shelved until much later.
Most people I know use only one airpod at a time. That applies to my two teens in highschool and a multitude of professionals I work with. The same people a decade earlier would just be using the Samsung mono ear pieces or the multitude of other ones that existed.
They are a bit of an improvement over some devices out there, but they are probably a downgrade from Bose bluetooth devices I have owned temporarily (I returned them to exchange for a wired buds pair).
I think you are giving Apple too much credit. I would say Airpods have good marketing and it is smart to give them away for free with their other products to create or perpetuate an illusion of popularity.
(1) Battery is nearly useless.
(2) The vendor decided to artificially slow the device with forced updates, or worse, the vendor decided to publish a list of CVEs and then declare your device ineligible for the necessary security updates going forward.