I wanted to ask for long time this question, Why does this keeps happening?
Apple, Kagi, Vivaldi, news companies and even Google.
I started seeing a good amount of people who stopped caring about consumer rights/freedom and started to think and advocate for companies.
Even in non-brands cases, a lot of people buy the product with the highest price, because they think that it has a higher quality despite the fact that there is no necessary correlation between both.
How do I know that? I know a shop that buy cheap products and sell them with very expensive price tag, to my surprise they are making insane profits.
What is happening?
No, the cheapest stuff is not as good as the pricey stuff. The midrange priced stuff is as good as the expensive stuff, but the cheapass shampoo and other grooming products are absolute trash and likely to have lead or other contaminants.
Take canned vegetables at a factory. Yes, the factory sells to different companies with different reputations and who each enforce different quality control. A can of green beans from the same factory sold by the expensive company will never have stems or leaves in their cans, but the cheaper ones might. Is the price difference worth it? Probably not. Are some canned foods like kidney beans indistinguishable between cheap and expensive? Probably.
Relevant to your point:
-Terry Pratchett
There’s optimal cheap and too cheap. Someone always wants to be the cheapest in its class, and they’ll compromise on quality to get there.