That is not what I advised. It's not about spending a specific amount. It's about not going too cheap when it doesn't make sense. I'll remove the amount as other people can also trigger on it.
It's not about the amount or "triggering". It's about advising people to spend what could easily be an order of magnitude more on parts where the cheap alternative is not only functional but for a lot of people even the only real option. Your junk food and beer budget may well exceed the disposable income of others. Fakes are an issue but not hugely so. I'm not saying you'll get original parts but most are functionally equivalent enough as not to make a difference for learning purposes.
The thing is, even when on a budget and buying from Asia there are sellers and "sellers".
On AliExpress/eBay, passives like resistors and small value capacitors (not electrolytics) are rarely a problem if you can put up with larger tolerances (see the thread about the out of spec resistors). Semiconductors are risky but usually if the component is something complex like a microcontroller, you have a chance to get a genuine part.
On the other hand, power components, simple stuff like transistors, opamps and similar that are easy to substitute for a similar working part (but with often much worse specs) are almost always fake. The same for electrolytic capacitors. I don't buy those from there unless I am feeling like a masochist or I am certain I am not going to push the component in question anywhere near its limits (like the OP does).
One way to avoid this issue is to get semiconductors locally. Mouser, Farnell, DigiKey, RS etc. - the shipping fees sucks but e.g. RS does free shipping if you order on weekends, and all of these have free shipping beyond a certain value of the order, so one has to accumulate BOMs from multiple projects.
An alternative if you really want cheap but still reasonable quality parts are outfits like Tayda (
https://www.taydaelectronics.com/, they have also multiple eBay accounts) or then LCSC (
https://lcsc.com/). With LCSC it is very unlikely you will get a fake component.
Basically the rule of thumb for me is - if it can blow up/start a fire/cost me a lot of money in repair/lost business, I am spending the money on to get a genuine part from reputable distributor (a 40ish volt input supply would certainly fall under that "can blow up/start a fire" category). If it is just for fooling around, I will buy even a pack of transistors from AliExpress to have some stock, but then I am not going to use them for something like what the OP is building.