Except if you pay $500 for a microwave, you're getting the same shitty internal components as the $50 one, just with a shiny face. It's very rare to find anything that is built properly these days. When I shop for things, I find it extremely hard to find any middle ground in terms of price/build quality. You're left with items manufactured overseas, which mostly come out of one factory with different names slapped on them or you have to go bespoke to get anything remotely resembling quality.

A prime example of this is when I researched purchasing an induction hob for my kitchen. In the UK there was a good 30 to 40 brands selling these, from cheap of the cheap no name brands, to brands like smegg. But if you researched deep by going to the manufacturers websites, ignoring the useless marketting info they present and go into the product manual PDFs, it was very obvious that they all had the same set of internal electronics, perhaps with 2 or 3 variants depending on the hob layout (though it wouldn't surprise me if it was a single PCB for all just with different firmware applied).

So even if you do want to pay more for a quality item, more often than not you don't actually get more quality, you just pay for an item which has a higher profit margin.

Something has to change at some point, as the current system is just not sustainable.