This has become a sort of unintentional skill in the ecommerce era. Everyone is using china, either the actual "first party" brand that is really just ordering bulk from china and reselling it stateside, or the various clones of that brand. The skill then becomes feeling out which of these various products and clones are coming from the better option of the couple chinese manufacturing companies everyone is using, then buying whichever of these is going for cheapest and least shipping headaches. Usually also if a product has been out for a couple years, there's an initial version widely available then an actual 2.0 version that solves a lot of the issues in the first, more sturdy at now known failure points, etc. That 2.0 version actually usually circulates in the no name brands for a little while before the "first party" brand eventually picks it up for their own line.

I grasp what you’re expressing, I really do. I’ve probably pondered this very thing too often in my life and can think of very specific examples where purchasing a non-brand name version of a particular product really froze up the decision making process.

However I think as I’ve gotten older, certain realities have occurred to me:

1. there is a fairly significant amount of people that would still pay more for the shirt the “right” logo and who would absolutely not pay less if it had the “wrong” (I.e., vs no logo). In fact, they wouldn’t wear the wrong logo even if the shirt was free. I include myself in this under certain circumstances and would conclude that some times the recognizable name actually helps put my mind at ease about the purchase, while being fully able to acknowledge that it was entirely a psychological thing.

2. Unfortunately there’s just simply no way of knowing this information (brand name product vs essentially same product without brand name) most of the time so letting that weigh too heavily on an otherwise thoughtfully considered purchase achieves effectively nothing.

3. The thing was probably entirely discretionary for my existence, so don’t buy it (otherwise, see #2…)

Not always.

I got a pair of T-shirts from These Glory Days. Wore them like 20% of time last two years and they look better then some others after 2 washes (albeit changed from them after coming back to work, and use work clothes at work, so not like they were used THAT much. So it's not always the expensive stuff that's equal to the cheap stuff. And funny thing, got them on a sale because they were pretty cheap, not really because I knew that they were quality.

Though had my wife with me when shopping and she might have "felt" the material and said that it was good for that price. Her mum is a seamstress if I remember the word correctly as somebody who sews clothes.

10x is not a likely number for quality, but for status symbol cost.