The Internet is a relatively new thing to China, so is GFW, the rapid upgrade of GFW, iirc, began appeared on somewhere after 2014. Before that, VPNs and Proxies were very stable, and minimal maintenance was required.

To the reason why it looks fine right now, my guess, is that the Chinese community is very much self-sufficient[1], plus, the majority of Chinese readers don't use any other language than Chinese itself. So it might not be about how it was handled, it's about what China is like.

-- [1] https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/2016/04/%E5%A4%A7%E8%B...