You have to do your research for sure.
Honestly I'm old enough to remember when Japanese products were still considered crap after WWII. Then their stuff massively improved and trounced US products. Japanese cars lasting 100's of thousands of miles while US junk at the time barely lasted that. This reminds me of that at a much bigger scale.
Really my day to day experience isn't this at all. I have good amounts of "chinese junk" tools that I use on a weekly/monthly basis that I paid probably 25% of a name brand tool and they are holding up just fine. I'm not using them daily so don't need to spend my life savings on them. I do a bit of research first so not getting the worst crap that some people run into.
Batteries are the big thing I've had excellent luck with. I can get Dewalt knockoff batteries at less than half the cost and twice the power and they last the same amount of time as my name brand.