The AKG earbuds that came with my S8+ and S9+ were fine, with better sound quality than the old Samsung earbuds. But the ones that came with my Note 8 and Note 9 died after a few months. In both cases, on one side the sound volume diminished a lot, and sounded very faint and feeble, while the other bud was fine. Interestingly, this is also what used to consistently happen with the old Samsung earbuds. I'm aware that these earbuds are not sweat resistant and so I never worked out with them, and yet somehow this still happened. Very unimpressed with the AKG earbuds.
I will say though that the AKG NC60 Wireless headphones that came as a promo with my Note 9 were excellent in terms of both sound quality and noise cancelation, and I use them almost every day. So I agree that AKG is a high end brand. Unfortunately I think they put their lowest-quality tech into the earbuds that come with Samsung phones.
Hopefully it'll be better with the S10+ headphones (to whatever extent the earbuds are different from previous offerings). I guess at some level it doesn't matter since we're all getting free Galaxy Buds, but I do like the sound quality that you get from the 3.5 mm audio jack, and it's pretty convenient to carry around a pair of cheapo headphones that I don't feel bad about losing.