“Expensive chinesium” and “cheap for a reason” doesn’t add up.
I feel like if the product was that bad or unreliable it simply wouldn’t sell the way it has been.
Sure cost plays a part but if it’s cheap enough to be a buying factor, odds are it’s cheap enough to buy outright or have it paid off early.
Sounds like it’s just another tool in a coding arsenal! As long as you take care to verify things like you did, I can’t see why it’d be a bad idea. It’s when you blindly trust that things go wrong.