I come in on the opposite end. I feel cheap airbrushes are the worst idea for a beginner, because your beginner's lack of knowledge/skill obscures the line between when an issue is down to insufficient skill, and when it's down to the limits of the hardware.
I think people who recommend newbies start with a cheap airbrush suffer from survivorship bias. They lucked out and got a good one, so they don't realize just how far a bad one can derail someone who doesn't yet know how to tell the difference.
My first airbrush was... not a cheap Chinese clone (this was long before those were a thing), but not good. I spent over a decade struggling with it, believing the whole time that it must be a skill issue rather than a hardware issue, and I just needed to practice more. It made the learning curve seem like an 10-mile high mountain that only wizards could climb. This in turn made me burn out on it, and look for reasons not to use it.
My second airbrush was an Iwata Hp-CS, bought at a discount because it was a refurbished unit. In literally the first ten minutes with it I had it doing things I'd never been able to get my first airbrush to do in over a decade, with ease. The difference was absolutely night and day, it was shocking.
IMO what a beginner needs most is something that "just works". Doesn't mean a super expensive high-end brush, I just mean something that won't actively fight you, so you can focus on your skills without confusion. If you can find that economically, then great, but don't fall into the trap of thinking that "skill matters more than hardware" means "all hardware is ultimately equally viable". A Ford Pinto isn't going to win Le Mans, no matter who's at the wheel.
Don't start your airbrush experiment by gambling with something that could give you a completely false impression of what airbrushing is like when you at your most vulnerable. The whole reason you're trying it out in the first place is because you're hoping it'll be successful. You wouldn't be buying a brush at all if that wasn't the desired outcome. I know that's tautological, but it's something I feel like people forget in their zeal to pinch pennies.
A vetted brand gets you a small known risk rather than a large unknown one. And resale value is generally within a margin equal to the cost of a Chinese clone. So if you can swing the upfront cost, it's both giving you a better chance of success, and is a better economy than buying a cheapie first, crossing your fingers it won't mes you up, then buying the better brush anyway if it doesn't.
Buying a better brush up front is cheaper in the long run, less financially risky, and less risk you'll dislike airbrushing. Either way you only lose $20-30 if your experiment fails, but if it succeeds you're out twice that in the long run if you plan to upgrade. Cheap airbrushes are only cheaper if you never upgrade, which goes directly against the oft-cited mantra of "buy cheap to try, and if you like it, upgrade".
At the risk of being overly blunt, threads like this tend to read like fishing for retroactive validation for deciding to buy a cheap brush.