Why does everything now feel like a gamble where the house always wins? You pay extra for a feature that's supposed to make things better and half the time it just does nothing or breaks in a month. Same thing with smart home stuff, cheap chargers, even food delivery apps that charge you more for cold fries. @terry_mitchell is right that it's a coin flip, but the real scam is that we keep buying the coin.

Ha, this reminds me of my uncle who ran a whole rack of pepper seedlings under two old fluorescent tubes he pulled out of his garage ceiling in like 2009. Those tubes were probably older than me and the peppers still went nuts. Meanwhile my neighbor dropped almost two hundred bucks on a fancy purple panel light and his tomatoes got all leggy and sad anyway. Honestly the plant does not know how much you paid, it just wants light and water and to be left alone. Basil especially is basically a weed, it will grow in a shoebox if you keep it wet. So no, I do not think you got lucky, I think the grow light industry just has really good marketing.