Personally, I've had absolutely miserable experiences trying to get products on Aliexpress.

I have at least 3 paid for orders that literally just never showed up (18650 charger, and two LFP 24v chargers). It's not a huge sum of money (~$45) but it's just... gone. Poof - into the ether. It's been more than 24 months.

I also have had orders take 3+ months to actually arrive. Consistently. And some products that do show up but are absolutely unfit for purpose (ex - copper wire that IS NOT COPPER).

Given the complete lack of reliability... I now avoid aliexpress for pretty much everything.

So sure - something like sparkfun/adafruit/etc is going to charge me an overhead, but that overhead ensures

1. The product will roughly work

2. The product will show up

3. The product will show up on a reasonable timeline

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The extra money isn't so I can have an illusion that I'm "above all that"... it's literally just setting a baseline service level that I don't mind paying extra for, because aliexpress isn't a reliable shop (and is borderline scammy as fuck).