Two of my last three monitor purchases were AOC. For the price I think they are super hard to beat. My latest purchase was a Samsung and it's been superb over several years of use, so far. The brightness of the Samsung and it's color reproduction have been much better but it well may be an unfair comparison to make for the price points. It's not that that Samsung was super high end, per se, but I caught it on a good sale where the AOC were purchased as value products.
When I originally moved from a 24 to a 27 it seemed really large for use on a desktop. I have gotten far more used to it and couldn't imagine going back now, just for the desktop real estate alone. My wife uses a 32 and it seems gigantic to me. She likes it.