Really, it's not.

Unless there's some regulatorially-mandated set of minimum standards, given the thin information channel of price ("what will I have to pay out of pocket right now for Product X, with no other indicator of quality, longevity, or potential risks"), the market will pursue low costs with an iron determination, over all other factors.

Consider that a corrolary of Gresham's Law, which in its essence says that given a nominal currency value, currency of lower determinable quality (lower specie metal content) will tend to drive higher-quality currency from the market.

"But wait, Dred," you say, "You just said that there was no other indicator of value. Why is low specie currency driving out high specie?"

Because that's not the relevant value, and it actually is apparent (or at least sufficiently so to a certain number of traders in coin). It's the nominal value that's the determinant for circulation. In the case of coin, it's face value which determines market exchange. Put another way: in a world of copper-painted zinc lozenges circulating as pennies, a diamond-encrusted gold penny will still only net you $0.01 in exchange value as currency. You're better off holding on to it or trading it for its specie / gem value.

With bulbs or electronics, the logic shifts around a bit, but the result is similar. Price becomes exchange value, product quality factors (colour registration, colour range, flicker rate, dimmer compatibility and performance, heat dissipation, any electronics buzz or hum, diffusion pattern, and most of all, that one factor you cannot determine in 3-5 minutes at a store: product life (or more properly: product-quality-life, the period of time it functions adequately before driving you bananas, even if it doesn't fully fail).

You're standing in a store aisle, or staring at an utterly uninformative webpage of quite probably counterfeit and fake-reviewed Amazon LED bulbs as well as whatever LED-bulb-adjacent search results Amazon's Alexa Search Engine has decided it needs to distract you with today, and you see two things:

- LED bulb.

- Price.

And "you" is the typical shopper. Which is to say, one who's not read this particular screed.

What are you going to do?

You're going to pick the lowest-cost bulb you see and offer a prayer to His Noodliness.

This is, incidentally, a chief reason why pure market solutions tend toward abysmal product offerings in the absence of some external regulatory, ratings, or similar systems.

There's an alternative, and some retailers follow this. Marks & Spencer in the UK long made a tradition of carrying only one exemplar of a brand, generally represented as "the best there is". That is, M&S undertake the research and quality determination costs for its customers. Your research problem is reduced to "shop M&S".

In the US there are retailers who follow a similar strategy, though emphasizing the price-quality relationship. Costco is among these, where typically only a small range of products within a category is offered (Trader Joe's operates similarly, though only in food). Friends purchased a convection toaster-oven from Costco recently -- not the cheapest model out there, but one which performs quite admirably, will handle a frozen pizza and most meals for 2-3 quite well, and (whilst slightly tricked out on controls) is fairly simple and straightforward to operate. On balance, "shop Costco" has been justified in this case.

The pure-pricing model typically works best (if at all) for nondifferentiable commodities of minimum complexity. Foodstuffs, bulk construction materials such as sand and gravel, coal, oil, etc. And yet even within each of these in developed economies you'll find grading and quality control, some imposed by government mandates, some self-adopted by industry.

And outside of bulk commodities -- in services, in wages, in rents, in interest and risk markets, in public goods -- pure market-based pricing absent various corrections, breaks down entirely or leads inevitably to pathological conditions. See "Iron Law of Wages" and "Law of Rent" -- the twin prods of numerous revolutions.

The problem with your "sane option" is that at mass market scale, say, the 100 million or so households in the US, or the 300 millions or so in China, it simply does not scale. Information and expertise implies some level of clustering and trust relations. Commodity pricing doesn't provide for this.