companero [he/him]

Ignoring the obvious bias of the author, I will address some points:

In spite of its unequivocal accomplishments and successes, China has, during the past decade or more, spawned a mountain of bad debt, unprofitable and uncommercial infrastructure and real estate, empty apartment blocks and little-used apartments and transport facilities, and excess capacity in, for example, coal, steel, solar panels and electric vehicles.

The author fails to see the bigger picture. Empty houses built when labor is plentiful become occupied eventually. See Pudong, once a “ghost city”, now has a population of 5 million. Infrastructure which doesn’t directly pay for itself does so indirectly. It should be obvious that extra capacity in solar panels and electric vehicles has potential to be a very good thing.

China’s leaders have been vocal this year about strengthening consumption and about improving the business environment for private firms and entrepreneurs, who have been pressured or punished to align their commercial interest with the party’s political goals.

Oh no, how dare the government force their interests on the poor businesses.

Some projects are worse than others.

From your description, it just sounds like a typical bad C++ codebase that uses every language feature under the sun, with no regard for readability. If you spend long enough trying to understand it, you probably will, but you may regret doing so. Frankly, I would just pick a different project to contribute to.

Faster than JavaScript

JS is usually fast enough.

Has a smaller file size

It really depends. If you aren’t careful, your Wasm blob can end up ballooning in size. If you start pulling in libraries and doing things like parsing JSON, your binary can get big, quick.

Wasm adds an extra layer of complexity that needs to be justified. In most cases, it’s just not worth it.