Or make it so you just buy a handful of them to have on hand when an idea strikes, when you wonder if you burned up a GPIO, when you want to give one away to a friend or interested kid, when you want a few to talk in a mesh project, etc.

Price is a product feature in a lot of cases.

The downside is that they tend to be less reliable in terms of obeying the specs and break unexpectedly.

I've been doing reviews of different dev boards on my channel and have had to send multiple cheap Chinese boards back because they were broken out of the box and a few others were dead within a few weeks of testing them.

For contrast, I have other chips that have lasted for years without issue... And their performance matches the spec (because they aren't cheap knock-off components).

You get what you pay for and with the cheapo ones you're usually trading paying a bit more once for paying a bit less multiple times.

Quantity is a quality on its own

I think you're thinking of the Pycom hardware. It's not quite as pricey as you referenced, but far more than the ESP32 based units. They also have a more formal ecosystem around their products, so for some that may be worth the price delta. I own a few of their boards and they have been nice to work with for what I've used them for.

https://pycom.io/solutions/hardware/