Any ideas?

Exactly. I started learning harmonica on those $20 pack of 8 and struggled for weeks to get anything to sound close to what I wanted. When I spent $60 on a decent instrument, I could suddenly do what I'd been practicing. There's a sweet spot for getting good enough equipment to actually learn without blowing the budget on something you may not continue doing

Right and top end is several hundreds or thousands. So $60 is cheap just not cheapest.
Woodworking planes.
You can go to Home Depot and get a plane for $15-20, and it will - mostly - cut wood. Spend $50-60 and get a decent name brand tool that gives a lot less grief. Spend $500 and get a Lie Nielsen that's just on another level.
Here's the thing, though: you have to be pretty competent to appreciate the difference between the $50 and $500 tools; and if you know what you're doing, you can easily tune the $15 so it works almost as well as the $500. Buy cheap to get started; upgrade if it turns out you stick with the hobby. I'll never know if I could have learned easier/faster starting with a $50 plane, but my guess is that I'd still have been gouging the shit out of everything.
- Another thing that works really well is buying old when it comes to some tools.
  I have a handful of 80 year old Stanley planes that are all the same quality as the expensive Lie Nielsen options, but I got them for about 50 bucks each.
- on another level
  Ohhh youuu
- I don't disagree with what you're saying. But learning to tune a plane takes skill and time. People get into woodworking because they want to build things out of wood. The love of adjusting tools comes later.
- The setup thing is no joke. I made a sub $200 mandolin play well out of its league with just some sandpaper to lower the nut height. I still got the nicer one but for the time inbetween it was great. Now the friend I bought it from for $50 has it on loan since she can actually physically play it now with the lower string height.
  I’ve learned that the ROI on most expensive stuff just isn’t really there unless you’re deep into it and want to treat yourself or you’re a professional(which is kinda the same but I’ll keep it separate). The caveat of course is that you have to start at a semi-reasonable place like you mentioned.
  I don’t know why we want to believe that the high-end stuff is made with fairy dust and that we’re not capable of these things with just a bit of effort and trust in ourselves.
  
  Lowering the string height on my guitar made it so much nicer to play. Didn't need to spend thousands, just needed a little work.
Absolutely agree with you, it’s about finding that value curve, where quality scales well with price. Say the cheapest ‘something’ is $10, the $20 one is twice as good, the $40 is maybe 70% better again but the $80 might only be 10% better than that.
As a beginner, I’d go for maybe the $20 option or the $40 if I were confident I’d stick with it. But yeah, it’s a pain when your ability to enjoy or succeed at a hobby is hampered by buying the cheapest option off AliExpress, haha.
You have to adjust the price of harmonicas (assuming you're talking about diatonic ones aka blues harps) to scale for this discussion. A $2.50 harp isn't a beginner's instrument, it's a child's toy. A beginner one would be more like $20. That's where I started and it would bend notes just fine. You can't really spend much more than 60 bucks on a top end harp.
The OP sceenshot is phrased negatively, but the basic premise is in a lot of hobbies people don't need the top gear because beginners won't actually be able to tell the difference. Mid tier gear is a different story.

No not to start with cheapest gear, but get the cheapest one that makes sense, then upgrade it to the best you can afford once you like it.

Makes sense as in the recommended entry level equipment, not the cheap waste from aliexpress/amazon.

This way you can get the feel of the hobby before you plunge a huge load of money on it.

Eh. I've been playing an $80 no name bass for five years. No one has any idea, because it sounds fine.

You don't need to go all out. Ability is more important than name brand.

It must have some decent machine heads to hold tune. Did you buy it used?
- It's pretty great actually. It rarely goes off tune. Takes about 20 seconds with a snark.
  It was brand new, off Amazon of all places. I did have to buy a new strap though, the one that came with it broke immediately.
  To be honest it does have a "trumpet" sound that I'm not fond of.
  
  I've got everything from an American G&L to a shitty $80 acoustic bass off Amazon. My favorite that I purchased instead of built is currently a mid level Alvarez, followed very closely by a butterscotch Squier 51 that I've had since they first came out (for under $100).
  The biggest problem with low end guitars and bass guitars these days is mostly QC. Sharp frets, super high action, and bad tuners are fixable as long as your neck isn't complete garbage. The problem comes in when new folks really have no idea what it should feel like and they don't want to take it down and pay half the cost of the instrument to have a good setup done. So they suffer and quit when they could have spent $45 and turned a garbage $80 no name special into a reasonable beginner instrument.
  To be fair, QC has also become a problem with much more expensive guitars as well in some cases (looking at you, Gibson).

I teach guitar. I have lost more students to a crappy beginner instrument than to any lack of desire, ambition, or ability.

I think with many hobbies there's a two-sided trap:

If you buy the absolute cheapest, you can end up hamstrung and unable to progress. On the other end, you can get caught up in having the very best, and miss out on actually progressing because you're convinced you just need to buy a better one.

eh, i think in photography you actually learn better habits and skills on older, more limited gear. it's easy to nail exposure when your camera can handle work at 3,000 iso, but then when you're at the edge of what your camera is capable of you'll be less able to tease out the performance you need. it's why i will keep my old canon rebel t2i. whenever someone wants to learn a little i toss them that thing. it can still take great pictures , you just have to work within its limitations. it's why my broadcast school made me learn to do reel to reel tape editing. when you know how much tape you have and how much of a pain it is to edit you will be way way better about getting your shot right the first time and every time.

these days, instead of using these tools as a crutch to shoot sloppier knowing that the gear can handle it now, i use them as a booster to do when more than i would have been able to before. i still shoot at the minimum viable iso every time on my a7siii, the difference is now i can keep shooting until the stars are plainly visible without needing a tripod.

ironically, this doesn't seem to hold quite as true for video now that i think about it. video is so tech and tool based. often it's newer guys that embrace the new tech and techniques that the old heads snub their noses at that end up doing the best. maybe not in Hollywood, but Hollywood is a totally different animal from what 99% of videographers do. I'm talking about video outside of Hollywood. often these newer tools will be lower quality less professional tools for quick turnaround. the kind of thing that corporate America is all about these days. quantity over quality is the name of the game in today's video world more often than not.

a video camera from 15 years ago is likely almost useless today for any real work, a stills camera from 25 years ago could be used to make a billboard ad right now.

Also it is important to know where to spend a money. I think that almost all hobbies have some gear where the cheapest option is best.

Especially if it's something that can be sold second hand for decent money, that way if you end up not sticking with it you can just sell your gear.

I don't typically see people advocate for the cheapest gear, just not to go all-in. There is something to be said for how much you can learn from stuff that requires a bit more tuning or customization.

In airsoft we had people who didn't even know there were other options show up with $40 clear plastic guns from Walmart (they're awful) and guys with $2000 air-powered guns from the best brands show up all the time, and both of these people sucked. Typically, they both also had a bad time, because neither could realistically learn anything from their guns considering they were already as good as they were ever going to be.

My advice was always to start with a low-mid range electric rifle that can take a high-capacity magazine. Having like 400+ shots in a match is more than enough. Pick a design that is easy to get parts and accessories for so you can build on it. Someday you grow out of it and then you drop the real money on an airsoft rifle, but you can run a good starter rifle for a long time. I only replaced mine because it catastrophically broke after years of rough play: I learned a lot from modifying it and it made my next gun choice much more educated that I ever could have managed as a newbie.

Skateboards with no pop. Guitars with shit intonation. More broadly: consumables that wear through too quickly and cause people to nope out of the hobby because it is ‘too expensive’, the list goes on.

There is something reassuring about quality gear because beginners don’t always know or properly understand this stuff.

With that said there is a point beyond which those returns begin to diminish.

Same in road and mountainbiking, we have BSOs, bike shaped objects.

Yeah fuck this guys (OP, not the person I'm replying under) take. Hobbies need less gatekeepers and if I want to do research about gear, make nice purchases as a way to deepen my investment into the hobby so be it.

Example: I just got into fitness. I have almost no need for some of the products ive been buying, however through the research ive stumbled across some excellent articles and a few YouTube channels that inspire me. Even if the gear / gadgets do nothing more than inspire you to show up and try them out, its worked.

But also objectively silly to buy the most expensive. Guitar one being a les Paul vs a seagull is probably not a good value proposition.

Most expensive is not always best, what fits you the best is the best and you don't know what that is until you try.