Many, many moons ago I was an associate editor for the now defunct Sky and Space magazine. A project that I enjoyed was an official tour of the Meade and Celestron factories in Irvine and Torrance respectively.
The landscape has changed, with my understanding that both companies are Chinese owned, with Celestron now made in China, Meade made in Mexico (and possibly China) and there is a rumour that Synta (aka Celestron) actually own Sunny Optical Co (aka Meade) but don’t like to talk about it due an anti-trust ruling in the USA forbidding their merger.
Anyway, back in the day, Celestron figured their secondaries to get an acceptable optical null. Meade used the mix and match approach (eg mate a “hot”secondary to a “cool” primary) to manufacture optics that were rarely perfect, but rarely really bad....they fell with an “acceptable” zone of quality. I found that Celestron optics were not as smooth, but they invariably had more accurate figures than Meade.
As to what you get with mass produced optics today, well....I suspect with rough sawn metal components, only your satisfaction is now guaranteed
