I personally find pretty good value as a collector in buying cards slabbed by CGC. They have a proper heritage as a grading company; they seem to know what they doing from a technical standpoint when it comes to grading sports cards; and the cards that I've purchased pass the eye test (under magnification).
If I can pick up cards that are graded highly by CGC that, as far as I can tell under magnification, look just as good as a similarly graded card from PSA, but at a deep discount, I'm happy. Granted, I'm not looking to sell those PC cards any time soon, if at all.
Also may help CGC that they have very deep pocketed, institutional owners/ partners:
https://www.blackstone.com/news/pres...bles-industry/
It would be very interesting for someone to run an experiment where they take 5 CGC 8s and 5 PSA 8s of the same card (like a popular recent vintage or early modern one like the 1979 Topps Ozzie Smith or the 1992 Mariano Rivera Bowman), crack them open, and ask 10 experienced collectors (armed with loupes) to RANK them from the finest to the weakest. Do the same experiment with 10 professional graders from PSA. My strong instinct is that the rankings would be essentially random.