I’m not talking about individual bricks but about the sets and what you get for your money.

Also, there are plenty of other brands with equally good bricks out there, like Bluebrixx.

And that quality does cost money.

Not as much as Lego wants you to believe.

the quality of Lego bricks is far superior to any of their competitors

That is flat out wrong. It was true a couple of years ago, but things have changed rapidly recently.

Lego’s quality has dropped quite a bit in the last 40 years, while some competitors have caught up and superseded. Sure, it’s still mostly pretty good, but things like brittle brown or the lime bionicle joints should be ample evidence that Lego is by far not infallible.

And if you look at the quality of current day bricks - Lego is having huge consistency issues, especially when it comes to certain colors, but also the bricks themselves. Running over the flat back of my Tudor Corner with a fingernail reveals inconsistencies in the width of regular bricks. Huge visible mold marks are everywhere. These issues were much less present 40 years ago, and high-quality competitors like Pantasy or Lumibricks are currently outcompeting Lego on basically every quality metric (except maybe glossy tile surfaces), at half the price.