Yep, any gun built anywhere to a low price point is bound to be poor.
A 30KUSD+ Arrizabalaga is a superb gun and worth every penny.
My 2002(?appx) AyA 20 ga has had many, many thousands of rounds thru it at clays and many hundreds at upland birds and the only problem was a broken left barrel striker. Ho-hum.
I shoot a number of Spanish guns from your era regularly and have never had a problem. I suspect that if a gun has been used and is still going strong after some 30 years it has no "soft steel" problems. It would be dead by now.
Anyway, my own personal feeling based on using and working on Spanish SxSs is that the bad steel is largely a perpetuated rumor based on some really cheap guns imported to a price point and they should never have been made.
