> Consumers, fundamentally, care about two things: * Price * Features

Consumers also care about accessibility. It doesn't matter to me if product X is amazing and affordable if I can't find it in any store anywhere near me or if amazon never shows it in search results because all they want to push is amazon basics and products made by FSLHVHSLR

If no company anywhere sells what I want, then I have no choice but to compromise and today there is a whole lot of compromising going on. Companies are more interested in selling what is most profitable to them, not what consumers actually want. Very often consumers are forced to buy what little is offered to them. The consumer "voting with their wallet" will always lose when companies also vote with theirs because theirs is much much bigger.

Consumers care about a lot of things besides that, it's just that (as you mention) those are the two most legible things to consumers.

Your specific example of cars is, IMO, not correct: Honda, for years, could charge a premium on their new cars due to a reputation for reliability increasing resale values.

For less expensive things, how much time should I spend researching quality USB-C to HDMI dongles? It's plausible that the chip in the $5 on amazon WOPEIME (or whatever) branded dongle is the same as the in the $25 Belkin one.

For intermediate things, time-pressure might matter. If my clothes washer were to fail today, I'm doing laundry by hand until I can get a new one in my house, so I'm probably playing quality roulette with several hundred dollars of my money at Best Buy.