I bought my first pair of Airpod Pros recently. The previous two years I was using Bluedio T Elf 2 that I paid $17 for on Amazon. The sound quality and feature set is obviously much better with the Airpods, but not 10X better despite costing 10X the price.

The Bluedios were better for podcasts than music due to their middling sound quality, but they paired properly most of the time and worked without issue.