Speaking about CHIFI, there's a very interesting series of insider CHIFI articles (eg costs of production for CHIFI and sourcing of drivers) here written by KopiOKaya, he was an ex tuner for TRN and KZ, I think he is now with KBEAR and BLON:
https://www.audioreviews.org/chi-fi-story-part1/
https://www.audioreviews.org/chi-fi-story-part2/
https://www.audioreviews.org/chi-fi-story-part3/
Having spoken to him and some Aliexpress sellers, CHIFI actually seems to have a lot of interconnections, eg bigger fish like KZ, NiceHCK and TRN do OEMs or drivers for other companies, or perhaps they even source their stuff from the same factory, and just put a different logo on it. Eg KBEAR KB10, CCA A10 and Tripowin TP10 seem to be identically tuned:
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/chinese-asian-brand-iem-info-thread.820747/page-1668#post-15080690 (post/graphs courtesy of Wiljen), NiceHCK M6 seems to be an OEM of the BGVP DMG, Tempotec Sonata HD Pro seems to be an OEM of the Hidizs S8 and so on.
A lot of CHIFI companies are related too eg Jade Audio and Fiio, CCA and KZ, KBEAR and TRI. Might be a smaller world than we think. It's pretty interesting stuff. But whatever, I gotta thank the CHIFI gods, as they really make stuff with good price to performance ratio, so that the past few years, we can all have a small taste of the audiophile hobby without needing to sell a kidney. QC for CHIFI is still a possible pitfall, but I guess if you buy stuff from somewhere with a robust return policy eg Amazon, it should be okay. Or worst case, one defective CHIFI product can allow us to buy a few more of the same (hopefully the QC lottery then works), and that may not even amount to the same price as a comparable western/japanese set in sound quality sometimes.