Mass-manufactured and cheap but low quality goods are extremely available. People also will pay a premium to some local craftsperson who makes artisanal stuff at an extremely noncompetitive price, often with less technical quality in some regard.
The real need is to have trusted brands and harder to game information about those companies, so you can more quickly tell when a company starts submitting to the MBAs and eroding their quality.
I won't, unless it's for the art aspect of it or to help a specific developer/artist that I want to see succeed.
But by default, I'll pay a premium for high-quality very precise and reliable consumer goods that undergo strict quality assurance processes, mass produced or not. If artisanal stuff has less quality, I'm not inclided to pay a premium for it in the general case.
How? Every time I find something like this, Private Equity scoops up this company and strips it for parts by the time I want to buy more.
GPT-(n) pollutes the freely searchable internet to shit while a subscription to GPT-(n+1) is sold as the solution.