Indeed! I recently discovered how sharp and good Victorinox blades are. Even their cheap 10 euros blades are unbelievably sharp. To the point where you have to handle them with additional care compared to other knives. The nonchalant way I was handling the Ikea-type cooking knives got me a few deep cuts.
The issue with cheap knives isn't how sharp you can get them — you can _anything_ razor sharp relatively easily.
Making a knife that _keeps_ sharp; and that will not chip/shatter/handle won't disintegrate is the difficult part.
(You can also argue about blade geometries, how thin the blade is etc for hours; but "can this be made sharp" is not a problem with cheap/bad knives, generally.)
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My (very limited!) understanding of knife steels is that "powdered steels" are not what you'll find in a random big box store; but rather more expensive, "fancy" lines.
You don't have to spend $450 on hand-forged, artisanal blade from Japan, but a $50 buck no-name is not going to be Buy-It-For-Life powdered steel knife either.
With a no-name, for sure. And maybe you see the difference after a long time? But after a year of unfettered abuse, my $50 Victorinox kitchen knife is still as dangerously sharp as new, and I have only sharpened it a couple of times.
I remember seeing some local (Australian) "celebrity chef" explain how he never sharpened his cleavers. He'd buy $8 cleavers of a specific brand that're widely available in Asian grocers here, and replace them when they lost enough of their edge to be noticeable. I now buy em 3 at a time, and while I don't use a cleaver that often, $25 worth of cleavers last me easily a couple of years.
I have tried sharpening them, I have a Lansky knife sharpening kit/jig that I use for my other knives, and it works fine at least for the first or second time, but spending ~20 mins on an $8 knife instead of getting the spare out isn't something i choose to do.
(And now I've typed that out, I feel somewhat guilty and wasteful about it...)
