At $35 this is a budget listing; the maths still has to work, and it works when the page is topical and the host is active.
For link value, this is one of the strongest practical categories: the pages rank for long-tail queries that persist year after year, and the audience overlaps directly with trades, suppliers and manufacturers. A contextual placement on amazonsalesday.org in front of 2.6k monthly readers is close to a recommendation from a contractor, which is also how it behaves in a profile.
Within the Home & Garden section of the index — 21 listings, 54 median DA, 3.2k median traffic, $40 median price — this placement is 12% below the median on cost and roughly 47% of the index median on audience. Listings in that section range from $20 at the cheap end, so the question is not whether $35 is high for a link, but whether it is high for this one.
Home and garden content wins on specificity: costs, timings, failure modes and materials. Readers in this category are usually spending real money and arrive expecting someone who has done the job, so a contribution written by a trade is published and one written by a marketer is declined. If you can put a real price or a real timeline in the article, do it; that is the content that gets re-cited.
Our observation on this host is do-follow outbound links in editorial content. That is the attribute, not the value: the 53 DA and 2.6k monthly visits are what the attribute is attached to.