It doesn’t matter that the consumer/gamer laptop is a piece of shit, because all of the competitors are too. Consumer hardware is a volume business, and the actual end-user experience matters very little compared to endorsement deals and marketing strategies.
Every one of the affected ASUS laptops probably got a glowing 5/5 review from the usual suspects, and consumers have little hope of getting a fair deal
this is not wrong. i've had a bunch of ASUS and ASRock stuff that was completely unusable. all had 5 star reviews while tech forums all showed people unhappy, with broken network ports, CPUs blowing up the boards due to 'too much IOPS' and other silly things that you do not expect from running a new device with fully compatible components....
There are vendors which do better generally, or have less aggressive 5-star robots. I got an MSI board now which came at a fraction of the cost of an ASUS board. It has worse specifications, but in all honestly. It works. it does what it says on the box without any grief. -- maybe it was a lucky shipment -- , but I am not going back to ASUS or ASRock. rather have 2 FPS less but a device that stays operation and can do it's basic features...
A classic example of not giving a toss about performance is the _horrible_ integration done for Windows Hello protocol on many platforms. The protocol is really good, yet there are bypasses possible on a lot of devices due to bad/incorrect implementations, completely breaking an for-once-actually-good-thing that MS designed.
buying consumer hardware, especially for gaming, is like a lottery these days, and shops / vendors give a lot of grief often (not always..) declining refunds or blaming bad user practices for clear device defects.
It exacerbated by internet warriors that defend their brand. I guess they are living the "gamer" lifestyle. I have been burned by ASUS monitors: slow boot up, issues with detecting Mac device requiring complete monitor reboot (you'd think DP/HDMI are universal standards no?), thin screen supports causing it to ultimately fail, horrible built in speakers. Just a "meh" product. However I guess im in the minority as usually when I bring up this story someone chimes in saying they've had none of these problems with their ASUS product ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ultimately I think this problem will fix itself. ASUS will eventually burn through enough customers that they will have to exit certain segments I guess?
Is this why MacBooks have had weird flickering issues with some monitors since the M1 with no end in sight?