Competitor brick quality is on par or better than Lego at least for some. You need to do a little research on which competitors use which brick producer, but for example the bricks I’ve had in the Mould King sets were absolutely indistinguishable from Lego bricks in quality.
Building Mould King right now. The difference is almost gone. Cada is worse than Mould King. Anyway with 5x price difference I can live with a bit lower quality. Lego pricing is just sick. Even used sets from not that distant past.