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Notes -
I think you're conflating two different product selection strategies, here.
While maximizing value is a good strategy, it requires investigating every product on the market, which is a huge investment of time (a very precious resource). Another strategy, filtering out the absolute worst with the minimum effort, and going with any of the remaining options does potentially involve paying a premium for a worse product in exchange for time savings, but it's not obvious that his is an irrational move.
In addition to status for visible brands, celebrity endorsements do signal that the product is not the literal worst. To take Gwenyth Paltrow's make-up as an example, I'd be reasonably sure that they contain relatively low levels of skin permeable poisons (at least ones that have an acute effect). Beyond that, if that assumption is violated, they probably have enough money to pay out in a lawsuit.
Those are things I can't be sure about for random things off amazon (or worse, bought in bulk off alibaba, though this would be a probable way to maximize value for my money).
Celebrity endorsements are a strictly less-useful filter for 'the absolute worst' than just googling the industry and picking the most popular product, though. So that doesn't really make sense. Also, i'm pretty sure people who are moved by celebrity endorsements already knew of several 'not-literal-shit' products in the industry the endorsed product is in.
Sure, but it requires slightly more effort (that is to say, more than literally none).
The filter when you go from no effort -> some effort seems to be roughly proportional to when a website goes from no payment -> some (that is to say you lose about 80% or so).
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