Well, of course there is the "buy cheap, get trash, duh!" talking point. But if I pay more, who's to say I'll get a better product? The OEM or some middleman or whoever might just pocket the difference and push crap anyway. Well-known brands have done this as well, either intentionally or because they got shafted by their supplier as well.
Wow what an unexpectedly useful article! I have exactly this hub and wondered if I was imagining things. It absolutely has issues beyond that, for example I somehow managed to make a couple of ports unusable for micro-controller flashing even though they used to work just fine. For that price, it's an OK choice to low bandwidth stuff like periphery dongles and security keys, and the form-factor makes it easy to attach under desk or behind display. And buttons come in handy when you need to unpower a dev board. Anyone can recommend a similar shaped proper USB 3 hub off Ali?
Whats always annoying is by using nested 4-port hub chips inside a hub with more than 4 ports you get very easily to the max nested depth limit (5). I have a monitor kvm switch that is also an usb hub. It itself only has two ports. Two usb hubs (that are internally nested) are plugged into those ports that I have at the back of my desk where all the HID are plugged in, but I also have a usb hub on the front of my desk so I can easily hotplugmy joysticks, yubikeys and usb flash drives.
Apparently that use case is very complicated with USB even in modern times :(
Not much to say about the article itself ("cheap stuff from AliExpress-or-its-Amazon-representatives isn't great, news at 11"), but just in case the author happens to be following comments here: I'm pretty sure the first photo shows your name, address and email in small print at the top?
It's actually the importer's info from the Chinese manufacturer, not the OP, since it's the switch packaging (it'd be inside the original package they'd have received from Aliexpress)
Apparently that use case is very complicated with USB even in modern times :(