The cloning threat is very real on high end systems. Things like electric train propulsion, water purification systems, tons of various industrial designs with enormous upfront R&D were copied wholesale.

Branding is completely irrelevant to the issue, you could well come up with say explosion-safe proportional valve design that is sold OEM worldwide and that an average consumer might not even know exists as a category.

> The Chinese cloning threat is largely overrated unless your product is very simple and you have 0 branding

This is proven false by the amount of top-selling products that Amazon has ripped off, produced for less (sometimes by striking a deal with the original factory), and then labeled “Amazon Basics”

Any examples of that where the product isn't commodity-grade? The AmazonBasics examples I see are things like household appliances, cables, cheap accessories, lightbulbs and batteries. If you're a small-to-medium sized business in the West, you should try to target market segments where the quality, branding and support of the product matters, as obviously you will lose in a race-to-the-bottom of undifferentiated low-quality commodities.

Look at how Raspberry Pi still manages to maintain a huge market presence despite the prevalence of cheap Chinese clones - even if the latter occasionally have superior specs on-paper, in practice I have yet to find one that isn't vastly inferior in terms of ecosystem and software.