Probably that was before Samsung offered 5 years of updates. And if the tablet was a bit outdated, it would have easily been outside of the software EOL date.
That’s why you should always go for phones/tablets that have been released this year and not take an outdated one. Not for the specs, but for the software support duration.
Over here there is a food discounter that also has a tiny electronics corner, where they have “great” deals. You can often get phones and tablets for less than half of the MSRP. The issue is, that all of them are either out of software support or close to it. A while ago they sold a cheap iPhone that had one month of software support left. And on iPhone, most apps only run on the currently newest iOS version. So a month after buying that iPhone, the user would lose access to most of their apps.