I can attest to that. Bought a bunch of cheap C8 clones at too-good-to-be-true prices, intending to just use them as hosts. Yeah, too good to be true.
I’d gotten some before, pretty decent brass pills, XM-L (genuine or lookalike, dunno, but pretty good), pretty bright (>300lm, at least, from ceiling-bounce tests), not bad for an Amazon special…
These… pfft! Plastic reflector, cheap featherweight Al pill, XP-E sized LB emitter, maybe 80-100lm of angry-blue light, tops. With a decent brass pill from FT that fit fine, a real 4300K XP-E2, new driver, it throws pretty nicely, but still isn’t a light I’d put much faith in. Still got the plastic reflector (ordered 3 different types of Al reflectors from FT to see which’d fit best), but just adding up the costs of getting the cheapo host to do anything (decent pill, reflector, switch, etc.), it’s just plain not worth it. I’d rather just get the real Convoy host from FT that’s all ready to go with solid parts, not crap. Much less agg as well.
If they were to ever clone the L2/L6, you can bet it’d be rated 45,000lm (maybe 150-200lm tops in reality), be half the weight, have horrible purple-blue 7500K LB XP-E clones, and just be an embarrassment to flashlights everywhere.
Sad part is, people’d buy ’em.