One bellweather reason for this state being impressive is that this is china's domestic market demonstrating the buying power needed to fuel private innovation
This used to be something only the US could do. China always had the population. But it wasnt rich enough to create local demand. Now it can and that creates a flywheel effect of feuling its own innovation, like EVs, LLMs, reusable rockets, sattelite ISPs, and all the other thingsthe US prides itself on.
And eventually it might even make novel things the US or anyone else hasnt even made yet. If that happens then the american empire is truly over
I'm pretty sure we're witnessing the accelerating confirmation of this right now, for all the reasons you've already stated. The US still has some niches at which it's ahead, but China is a mere intellectual property theft away from being able to pwn those areas as well (rightly, or likely wrongly, but even 'wrongly' by any law is 'rightly' by China's point of view, same as plenty of US decisions of late - the lens makes all the difference).
I think the one caveat to this is that consumer spending and GDP growth has slowed dramatically especially following the housing bubble popping (remember Evergrande?)
A lot of the very high-tech manufacturing in China is still dependent on Western supply chains (ASML is one major one for semi-conductors) and there's a level of complexity and specialized knowledge there that probably doesn't exist domestically yet so the transition to a knowledge-dominant vs manufacturing-dominant economy is hitting a logarithmic wall.
That said, China's intellectual property ecosystem is extremely open and free. This is really a cultural thing, embedded since the early days of China's printing press half a thousand years ago when editing, rewriting, and printing your own versions of someone elses's works was totally normalized (think AO3 but standardized and normalized at a societal level). So we'll get to see whether or not that business-friendly theory of 'IP exists to protect genius inventors and without it we have no inventions' governing theory bears out or if a completely permissive and free ecosystem is better for innovation in the longterm.
This used to be something only the US could do. China always had the population. But it wasnt rich enough to create local demand. Now it can and that creates a flywheel effect of feuling its own innovation, like EVs, LLMs, reusable rockets, sattelite ISPs, and all the other thingsthe US prides itself on.
And eventually it might even make novel things the US or anyone else hasnt even made yet. If that happens then the american empire is truly over