Nah, I think you're extrapolating to far. It's just a connoisseur mentality -- the same as for wine, scotch, guns, etc. It can be annoying, it's often untrue, but it taps into the same desire to be self-righteous that's buried in your post, and many of our day-to-day actions.
Please don't interpret the previous sentence / paragraph to mean "you're self righteous!" in the usual insulting conversational sense. I think it's a widespread human desire. I.e. I often bristle at someone's behaviour and am about to school them before I thoroughly understand the situation.
Actually guns are an outlier -- many arms manufacturers use the language of authenticity, but then mass-produce their products.
There may be a little touch of unconscious racism re: China, but that's a society-wide thing, not some defect / choice of these craftspeople. I.e. there was a time when goods manufactured in China were crap. Now they're not, but the bias remains.