Except there are competitors by now with equally good tolerances and overall part quality that still cost half as much, so that can’t really be the reason
I guess I’ve been out of it too long - I’ve always found knockoff brands just don’t have the same precision and quality.
To be fair, it’s still hit or miss, you need to do a little research to know what you’re getting, but it has gotten sooo much better in the last couple of years. At this point, any brand that uses pieces made by gobricks is going to give you excellent piece quality rivaling or even surpassing that of Lego in some aspects. My recommendations if you want to check it out are Pantasy and Funwhole, both make great original sets with high quality prints, the latter even with fully integrated light kits. Those are not the only options, but the best ones at the moment in my opinion
Edit to add: as said a lot has happened just in the last few years, so to get a good picture of the current quality landscape, even with the brands I mentioned it’s a good idea to stick to their newer sets for now, since you might still get earlier generations of bricks that are not quite as good with the older models that have been sitting on shelves for some time