When does the “for now” stop? When is a brand actually a mark of a certain quality and when is it a facade for a swapped tooling line backed by a dozen products

When does the “for now” stop? When is a brand actually a mark of a certain quality and when is it a facade for a swapped tooling line backed by a dozen products? We might have had reliable brands once, but no longer — now all products have to be evaluated individually.