I feel like you're underestimating the average large state actor's ability to employ subtlety when they really care about a long-term foreign intelligence operation.

For example, it doesn't have to be the case that DJI has ever been told to collect data for the CCP. That would be a big OPSEC violation — as soon as anyone in the foreign media learned of it, DJI would be as dead as Huawei or Tiktok.

Instead, it could just as well be that the CCP have left DJI themselves untouched, but have instead manipulated market conditions around them: arranging it so that DJI "just seems to never be able to" hire any security experts; and so that DJI (and everyone else) hire product managers from a pool trained on CCP-sponsored university programs and industry media sources, that have those product managers parroting "useful" beliefs like "more analytics is always better."