I like to think of it as competency being bucket with a small hole. Some folks have a big bucket some small but all of them need experience to fill the bucket. In the US maybe we have larger buckets but it doesn’t matter because we’re not filling them fast enough or have enough of them. The Chinese are filling millions of buckets to the point of overflowing while the US has a thousand half full ones.

Chinese products in the us tend to be garbage because that’s just how incentives line up. There is no brand, the amazon ratings have no transparency or consistency so high quality goods don’t stand out except in niche areas. The market incentive is just too cheat the ratings and put out the cheapest product possible. That could probably change quickly if Amazon wasn’t so damn evil.

Many American brands are like that now too, they sold their brand name to some private eq firm gutted their core product to shave off a few cents., they fired their core engineers and moved production to a state that still allows federal minimum wage pay and prohibits unions. That might be ok if it shifted experienced workers but usally the workers don’t stick around for very long and the company goes bankrupt or goes overseas at that point. Point being that knowledge is simply being lost.

Now your set spindle as an American buyer you got no chance of buying a real one but if you were in China and you knew how to work the right channels you might be able to get one that’s closer to spec, one where the corners weren’t cut as badly and the product is better, but if you need a 30k precision tool China isn’t the place to get one. The supply chain just isn’t controlled enough for top of the line products in most places.