Nothing wrong with the Clarks at all. They’re mostly cheap because they have less costs- they make loads of ’em, they barely advertise, they don’t do racing/sponsorship, and they’re not trying to be high performance and they don’t do a 2 year model cycle so their r&d is low- they have basic products that work well so they’ll just keep making them til the world ends. (and, er, I think quite a bit of that r&d is “inspired by” old shimano).
What kind of underscores it, is that mtb brakes got excellent at least 10 years ago, everything since then has been marginal gains, occasional nonmarginal losses, novelties, short product lives which mean new issues creep in as fast as old ones get solved… There’s a reason Shimano have years where their top end brakes have been really pretty crap, but the bottom end ones are always a good buy. Clark just operate on a different basis, they’ll never make a great brake either.