Hah, first company I worked for involved the development of embedded systems and the boss wasn't shy about buying parts from AliExpress (thankfully most of it w

Hah, first company I worked for involved the development of embedded systems and the boss wasn't shy about buying parts from AliExpress (thankfully most of it was still DigiKey). Some stuff had a significant cost difference: Official Omron rotary encoders vs copies, for example. Of course they usually worked about 70% as well as the real thing.