I've been to Hawaiii a couple times, and loved those trips. Beautiful land, beautiful people, beautiful climate, what's not to like?
My first handmade ukulele was a tenor, built on the Big Island, mostly of koa, but I didn’t get it to play Hawaiian music — I’m a sixties guy; I like geezer rock and blues and folk, a little country and even some jazz and standards, and the Beatles are at the top of my set lists. (I can manage one Iz song, and it’s the same one everybody else does, and not Hawaiian, save for his flavoring.)
Great music, a lot of it from the Islands, but it doesn’t call to me in particular. Just how I was raised.
Then again, there are some outstanding uke makers in Hawaii, and that’s a real thing for me. You’d expect that, since they started down that road a lot sooner than most of the rest of the world.
However, there are outstanding uke luthiers elsewhere, too, so for me, the provenance of an instrument is more about the builder than the location in which it is made. You can find great ukuleles creators all over the world these days. Same problem there as with the top Hawaiian makers: Getting on the wait lists ...