I believe that honest, reliable, innovative and low priced Chinese MCU's may sell well in the West, but we have long memories and don't like being ripped off with counterfeits and fakes.
They didn't rip you off if they made it clear that those are CKS32Fxxx or GS32Fxxx, and they told you those are legally legit STM32 clones. Those chips are properly licensed by ARM, and you can't protect a peripheral set by any IP laws nor a naming schema rest of STM as a trademark.
ST did try to made them illegal by claiming that they used ST's header, libraries and linker script files, but since then they wrote their own.
Running ST firmware on those chips is still illegal as ST header and library license prohibits as such, but that's the liability of the user, not the chip manufacturer.
Also, GD doesn't even care how their chips sell in the West. They care to sell the chips to large quantity appliance manufacturers, and they will trickle to the West in those final products.
I don't think Chinese fablesses even care to sell to the West directly. Rest of ESP series, I can't even recall a single manufacturer that actually supported low volume manufacturers. Put it simple, they don't care.
Chips don't grow on trees in China. They are manufactured at the same cost, if not more, due to the higher tax and embargo of high end chip making tools, and they are sold cheap due to lower service cost, which a great part of it is customer support cost.
That's also why ESP will never be a super leader in the industry. Some of their chips are more expensive than Nordic and TI parts, and how do you expect them to hit mass market?
You like it or not doesn't matter. What matters is the market likes AllWinner and MTK, not TI, at least not in Asia and most households in even the West. Qualcomm and Samsung do have similar products, and Amazon even used them in early Echo series. Guess what, those got replaced with MTK.
TI DaVinci had the same success in Chinese IP camera market, and guess what, AllWinner and HiSilicon completely crushed the market despite the lack of good quality documentation and zero support availability.
And before you ask, I believe OwO's point was remarking a GD to STM is bad, but that's not done by GD. You get fake chip makers in China, and we hate them too. It doesn't make GD clones of STM any bad.
And to your point, why do sellers market them as STM, well, if they went far enough to remark those chips, do you think they have integrity? Again, that makes the sellers bad, not GD.
And as a disclaimer, I don't work for GD, nor AllWinner or HiSilicon. I do work in research industry looking into second sourcing the latest Western technology, but we do clean IP from scratch, and build our own IP portfolio licensing to mainly Chinese mainland and Taiwanese IC manufacturers. I work with Chinese second source chips as a hobby, like GD/CKS vs STM, AllWinner vs TI/NXP, Gowin vs Lattice and more, but I don't get a single dime from them.