I think it's slightly different from that. My understanding is that a lot of stuff on there is marked as legitimate brand name goods that aren't what they purport to be at all. The example that stuck out to me are the countless YouTube videos where someone buys what is claimed to be a, e.g. GTX 1080 for $50 that's really some ancient card with the BIOS flashed to _report_ that it's a 1080. Stuff like that seems to be the MO of wish.com.
Last year me and a friend played a game of "wishing". Spend $30-50 on cheap crap on Wish, and the shipping is so slow that you end up getting surprises in the mail the rest of the year.
In principle, there's nothing wrong with the online dollar store concept. It's not even a "poor people" thing, it's remembering there are products that make sense to buy at the dollar store, and ones that don't.
There are a billion product categories where an unbranded direct-from-manufacturer product is entirely adequate. I don't need to pay for a premium name brand on a basic phone case, Arduino clone, USB 2.0 cable, or a replacement part for a toy.
You can lean into that. With sites like Aliexpress and Banggood, I know more or less what I'm going to get, and generally the products meet expectations, so I'm a happy return customer.
Wish starts out in much worse territory. They overpromised and underdelivered for long enough that they've become a meme, an anti-brand. I suspect they've been able to show appealing numbers just by burning through the suckers who will try any too-good-to-be-true offer once, but eventually you run out of those customers and have to pivot towards building a repeat customer base. How do you do that? Maybe aggressively culling products with poor customer feedback, strong guarantees, and reined in advertising designed to prevnent disappointment.
Basically an Aliexpress clone with cheap chinese stuff