Indeed. It is easy to mock, but some people buy cheap planes and some buy high end at many times the price. Some people buy a ford fiesta and some buy a ferrari. It just depends what you want.
The electric sharpeners tear off quite a bit of metal and they are obviously unsuitable anyway for single bevel knives. There is a string market for white and blue steel Japanese artisan made knives ( and US too and excellent craftsmen like Will Catcheside in the UK) and for top end workmanship a single knife can be many hundreds of pounds. Having seen many high end knives made by Artisans, mainly in Japan, I have yet to see an electric grinder in use. But I have one and they do work, up to a point.
Steels do not sharpen knives by the way, they just reset the edge as long as the steel of the knife is softer than the "steel". They are useless on very hard steels once you get into the upper ends of the rockwell scale for knives.
Anyway, I believe sharpening is a bit of a tricky subject on this site and so shall not comment further the than to say if I wanted to keep a knife very sharp, even relatively soft German steel, I would personally not use an electric grinder, but would prefer wet stones. You can get some that are oK and quite inexpensive. Stropping has more effect than you might expect and you don't need anything fancy. People strop on newspaper, cardboard, felt, balsa, leather.
If you look on knife or razor forums you will find lots of information on this and plenty of videos on you tube.
