Nailed it. If I could say "Alexa, order AAA batteries" and I'd get something generally recognizable as a legitimate brand at a reasonable price, I'd do it. If I were today to say "Alexa, buy milk", I'd fully expect to get a gallon of "Doctor Methy's Cow Juice" in a ziploc bag. There's no way I'd trust it to get me what I actually wanted.

They probably understand, but the Alexa team are powerless to make the necessary changes without higher level executive initiative (as the way things go in big orgs like Amazon). Even something pragmatic like "why not restrict the available options to known brands" can have more nuance and can be far more complex than just coming up with a list of brands to whitelist.

Those weird brand names come from an odd method that Amazon uses to reduce counterfeit products. They require some sellers have a brand name filed with the US patent and trademark office. It can be difficult to get a trademark for something too generic or common, but if it's just a garbled string of characters, it's really easy to get approval.

As far as those cheap imported products go, for any given type of product, they all come from the same handful of manufacturers, so which off brand doesn't really matter. Once I figure out which variation I want, I just want to be able to sort by price, and get the cheapest version. Amazon's maliciously broken sort-by-price feature already makes it difficult, but ordering through an Echo makes it impossible.

I've ended up using eBay more than Amazon, as well as the occasional exporter like ALiexpress and TVCmall.

A curated list of "household essentials" would go an extremely long way to making this useful. But as far as I know, they never really did anything of the sort.

What are you talking about. KWYBLPOP makes the finest plastic knockoffs on the planet and has done so for the last five minutes straight.