Indeed, all data shows that you don't generally get what you pay for in hi-fi. Look at Amir's paper on DAC measurements and his price to performance correlation graph - there is no correlation. Granted the only performance metric on that graph is SINAD, but if you look at reviews, other measurements generally follow the same pattern.
Or even just looking at Schiit: their more affordable products ravage their more expensive ones in price. I made these after being inspired by Amir's DAC research paper, though I screwed up the scale of the bottom one.
It's funny how Schiit provides Audio Precision Analyzer reports for most of their products, giving consumers the data to realize this and skip their overpriced stuff.
The Sennheiser HD 820 vs AKG K371 is another good, extreme example. Hell, Sennheiser's own best headphones are $400 and less. HiFiMan's best performing headphone in their lineup being the HE6se, their Sundara and HE400se are also good, while most of their expensive stuff is far worse.
"You get what you pay for" only seems to be true for certain brands, often pro audio brands. You get what you pay for with Genelec and Neumann studio monitors, or RME interfaces for example. Outside of these sorts of brands, if anything there seems to be a negative correlation between price and performance to me.
I just added my main DAC there on the chart. I definitely won't be able to tell any of these Schiit DACs on a single blind test apart but I like to collect the only audio DAC in existence that has a Texas instrument DAC11001B chip on my collection. If I'm focusing on audio performance, I seriously don't get what I paid for, but if I'm focusing on audio experience (sighted listening biases, having a non-audio oriented SOTA R2R DAC chip (Ti DAC11001B) coupled with vintage/glowing tubes distortion effects implementation + Susvara distortion/phase effects) then I get what I paid for the experience that I want.
Being scammed IMHO is if you have a specific perspective of what you want to get out of your audio system, but you didn't get the result you wanted (for example, you wanted the power output of an amp that promises 5 watts, but got duped that it's only a 5 watts for 1/20th a second and it's only actually under 1 watts continuous/forever load e.g. iFi iDiablo 2). I wanted the distortion effects of a simple single ended triode strapped ouput transformer coupled amp and was absolutely delighted with the sighted listening experience that I got out of it. Then again, performing a proper double blind, volume matched to 0.01 dB ABX test comparing that SET amp with 5% THD+N against any SOTA performing solid state amp, I am willing to bet all my chips that nobody can reliably tell a difference (95% confidence or better) between the two amps (yes, 5% THD+N vs 0.00009% THD+N amp) on those conditions