i have no idea how they were viewed to the world at large; i was a teenager when these were released. I know the vibe at the time though was these were budget chips that you got if you couldn’t afford intel chips, and the cost discount came with a performance hit it wasn’t an AMD situation.
i’m pretty sure i ran a cyrix chip at some point although i think it was a likely a 486 clone until i could afford a proper discount intel chip; the celeron
i very vaguely recall cyrix having a 586 but i can’t recall if it was drop in compatible or not - their chips were always bootleg quality as i remember it
stacks of diskettes, for every operating system.
would routinely spend hours doing an install only to hit a block and have to reinstall DOS to have modem access to get help on usenet. Then hours of reinstalling to move forward and repeat on another issue.
I really loved it though, it was a massive upgrade over DOS and windows on a 286.
the mini from rust is my personal favorite