China has more stringent laws against child labor than the USA. In China it is suspected that 10 million children are in the workforce. In the USA it is suspected that 6 million children are in the workforce. China has over 4 times the population of the USA and over the last decade has been restricting the use of child labor more and more. In the USA, regulations against child labor are being relaxed.
China has more stringent laws against prison labor than the USA. In China, there are about 1.6 to 1.7 million prisoners at any given time. In the USA, there are 1.3 million. Yet in the United states upwards of 1 million prisoners must engage in prison labor and an uncounted amount that are not prisoners but as part of non-prison sentencing must "volunteer" at places like chicken packing plants. In China we cannot know exactly how many people do prison labor, because western propaganda says their prison labor numbers are 2 million to 16 million prisoners despite the fact that we know only 1.7 million people are prisoners. American prison labor is used in goods from Walmart to Target.
If you buy "Made in the USA" goods you are support a regime that exploits children and slavery. If you shop at Target or Walmart or many other chain outlets you support these things. I'm not even being facetious.
The reason those brands have crazy names is that they're rebranding stuff they bought from the actual manufacturer. Amazon will let any seller list identical products on the same listing, unless your brand name is trademarked. So to prevent another seller from using their (paid) product reviews, listing images, SEO, and advertising spend they make a new trademark. Because it takes a long time and a lot of legal work to find out if your trademark is unique for your product category, they make it something crazy that's never been used for anything so there's no chance they later lose their exclusive product listing.
Your friend is right. The world needs to know about Chinese "dark factories" where workers are forced to assemble products 24 hrs a day without breaks.
Spoilers: "dark" because they're so automated you could run them with the lights off.
They aren't cheap anymore with middlemen. In Poland both physical and internet shops are full of things sold up from Aliexpress with markup of sometimes hundreds %, and looking at the delivery times at the internet shops they aren't even pretending they aren't just doing crude speculation.