At the local Woolworths supermarket today I spotted two different brand LED bulbs, both the equivalent of a 60w incandescent and both are made in China.
The Philips cost $13.99
The Megaman cost $6.
The dilemma is, is the Philips really worth the extra $8?

Actually, for my experience, NO.

See my review about led lamps: if i exclude no brand crap chinese lamps, Philips is the most prone of failure.

At the time the Megaman ones were displayed in a floor stand. Maybe they were on trial to see how well they sell. Anyway I noticed yesterday that the supermarket did not have any. There was no floor stand and no space on the shelf for this brand.

At my local Woolworths the Megaman LED bulbs were on the shelf along with the Philips ones, there was no display on a floor stand. I picked one up and am currently giving it a trial run in the lounge room, in a table lamp. It switches on immediately and when turned off it turns off immediately too unlike the other LED bulbs I have seen which dim out as it's internal capacitor discharges.

My brother bought three of the Megaman ones. He thought the Philips were too expensive in comparison.

At my local Woolworths the Megaman LED bulbs were on the shelf along with the Philips ones, there was no display on a floor stand. I picked one up and am currently giving it a trial run in the lounge room, in a table lamp. It switches on immediately and when turned off it turns off immediately too unlike the other LED bulbs I have seen which dim out as it's internal capacitor discharges.

soft starting is good; dimming out due big capacitor is also good, because this means big capacitor, so less ripple current flow into led.

Slow "dimming out" or better to say afterglow does not mean the LED won't flicker, as well as no afterglow does not mean it will flicker.
The slow dimming out just mean the ballast uses just the most crude attempt to reduce the flicker - parallel capacitor. But necessary to say, that is the most inefficient way - the LED's have rather low dynamic impedance, so you need very large capacitor to get only moderate ripple suppression, while you get quite significantly long afterglow. And that approach means, the rather limited space inside of the LED ballast box is ocupied by that stupid capacitor. And that crude circuit usually means, there is no real efficient limiting of the peak current, so I would expect the LED's to get way more beating from e.g. mains disturbances, with consequences on their life endurance...
Way more efficient way is to place the capacitor so, the LED is still separated from it by the current regulator. In that way you may easily eliminate the flicker whatsoever even with rather small capacitor, but because small, you will get no observable afterglow at all (just because the small capacitance holds energy not longer than a single mains period or so).

And if the design uses decent current regulator and no tank capacitor at all, it usually means one of the weakest point of the ballast design is not present, so the lamp could then easily reach the rated life in real service (not only in the lab, with super clean power supply, etc. - we all know the "Dieselgate", I guess)

Slow "dimming out" or better to say afterglow does not mean the LED won't flicker, as well as no afterglow does not mean it will flicker.
The slow dimming out just mean the ballast uses just the most crude attempt to reduce the flicker - parallel capacitor. But necessary to say, that is the most inefficient way - the LED's have rather low dynamic impedance, so you need very large capacitor to get only moderate ripple suppression, while you get quite significantly long afterglow. And that approach means, the rather limited space inside of the LED ballast box is ocupied by that stupid capacitor. And that crude circuit usually means, there is no real efficient limiting of the peak current, so I would expect the LED's to get way more beating from e.g. mains disturbances, with consequences on their life endurance...
Way more efficient way is to place the capacitor so, the LED is still separated from it by the current regulator. In that way you may easily eliminate the flicker whatsoever even with rather small capacitor, but because small, you will get no observable afterglow at all (just because the small capacitance holds energy not longer than a single mains period or so).

And if the design uses decent current regulator and no tank capacitor at all, it usually means one of the weakest point of the ballast design is not present, so the lamp could then easily reach the rated life in real service (not only in the lab, with super clean power supply, etc. - we all know the "Dieselgate", I guess)

Wasn't supposed to be mainly for ripple limiting?

With the capacitive dropper style ballast the electrolytic capacitor parallel to the LED's has two basic roles:
First swallow the power ON inrush current spike (when the power happens to be connected just when the mains voltage is high), for that purpose the design expect, this capacitor is practically discharged, so has plenty of voltage headroom till the voltage, when there is significant current into the LED's. But for this purpose even rather low capacitance is very effective (about double of the ballasting capacitance is enough for a typical design with LED drop being about half of the mains voltage), if it features some discharging bleeder resistor or so (so for each power ON event the capacitor is completely discharged).
And the second role is obviously the ripple, so flicker reduction. But there only moderate reduction is possible and that needs rather high capacitance. It is not that effective as the active regulators, but still it maintains the simplicity of the simple capacitive dropper circuit. With such sizes (about 50..100x the value of the seres dropper capacitor to get ripple down to about 50% level, about a limit to be considered as flicker free) the LED's alone ensure sufficient discharge after power OFF, so it should be able to swallow the inrush peak without any dedicated bleeder. But such ballast becomes rather large and expensive (if it is supposed to use quality components, mainly both capacitors). So this concept is really not used for any higher power, nor high quality (low flicker,...) products, it becomes just too expensive compare to the simple active regulator circuits.
What I have observed (e.g. the 4W filament lamp offered some weeks ago in Lidl stores chain in Europe), for the low power becomes quite common to use high voltage LED chain (~280..300V for a 230V product), supplied from just a rectified and filtered mains, regulated by a linear current regulator (usually J-FET based component), while this power level was a main domain of the capacitive dropper circuits in the older designs.

Actually, for my experience, NO.

See my review about led lamps: if i exclude no brand crap chinese lamps, Philips is the most prone of failure.

Yea, I once bought a five pack of those GU10 base LEDs from Philips to replace halogens. Several died within a few weeks. Then they released a new version with a heat-sink, and they seem to be working better