I think there's a difference between making an extreme claim in the early days of this thing without giving evidence to back it up, compared to now where there's been a year's worth of putting the pieces together. And even now we don't know-- it's just better informed speculation (although the intelligence community may have more to go on that we don't know about.)

The media isn't great about reporting science, but I don't fault them for being critical of an unsupported claim made at a time when it was in the political interests of a person's party to cast blame in China's direction.

Calling that a fiasco is itself ignoring the contexts involved as reporting changed. Making an unsupported accusation that turns out to be correct doesn't mean it was right to make the accusation at that time.