I personally never really considered "Chinese knockoff" a negative term because those products still fill a niche that is beneficial to the consumer, usually very low cost entry level offerings the "brand name" companies don't bother making. Now that the "brand names" have straight up said they don't intend on making entire categories of consumer products anymore, this could be a great opportunity for Chinese companies.
There's a stereotype of Chinese brands being "low quality" which obviously isn't always true to begin with, but even if we assume it is, given the choice between a maybe lower quality product you still get to own and none at all, I think the decision is pretty clear, at least for me.
With shortages of things like GPUs, third party Chinese manufacturers can't easily jump in to fill the gap because those chips are complex and proprietary both in the silicon design and the interfaces/APIs they need to work with, so the barrier to entry is quite high. Even if they straight up reverse engineered and "stole" Nividia's designs (which I personally don't even consider unethical), they'll have a hard time legally selling them in Western markets because Nividia will sue them. And even then China is making incredible strides at developing their own GPUs from the ground up. Meanwhile, DRAM and SSDs are much simpler than a GPU and there are already Chinese offerings of both on places like Aliexpress and even Amazon (not just using brand name chips on their own board, though that's still more common, I'm certain there are also in-house Chinese DRAM and flash chips from small firms), I don't see a reason they can't just ramp up production and cash in on the shortage in the West. Though there could still be details I'm not aware of, the way I see is that all they have to do is offer something reasonably reliable and less expensive than the ridiculous prices "brand name" parts are going for nowadays (not to mention when the existing stock sells out and are no longer restocked) and I can't imagine them not getting customers looking to build custom PCs for cheap.
Again, I personally don't give a shit if they "stole" designs from the brand names or not, because I consider stealing intellectual property from billion dollar corporations to be morally neutral.
So, people more knowledgeable on how electronics manufacturing and supply chains work, do you think we'll see Chinese brands becoming more prominent in the Western consumer computer parts market now that the likes of Samsung, SKHynix, and Micron straight up don't even want to sell to consumers anymore? Or is the paradigm of buying parts to build your own computer just cooked?
I mean I'm sure it was a mix. There are a lot of stories out there about how if you didn't stay on top of your outsourced factory they would look everywhere to cut corners to save a few extra cents here and there.
You (used to?) have to constantly check production quality and make sure nothing was changed out for a low cost part or lower cost source material. Otherwise your product quality falls off and you're losing money on warranties and repairs and losing customer goodwill.
The other thing that happened is these factories, once they had your design, would make the same thing with lower cost parts / materials as a knockoff and sell it unbranded, as they don't care about US or European IP Laws. Word might get around that "hey you can get the same brand X product as brand Y or from Aliexpress and save 50%". Now they're undercutting you, and you lose customer goodwill because people think your product is overpriced. Then the knockoff fails and they are happy they never bought your product in the first place because they think yours would have failed too. Through word of mouth people say "oh that broke after a month" not realizing the offbrand was made with shoddy materials, less screws, cheaper batteries, an inferior screen, literally anything they can do to save money.