What does "are not good after all" even mean? I feel there are too many value judgements in that question's tone, that blindsides western observers. I feel like the tone has the hidden implication of "this must be fake after all, they're only good at faking/stealing, nothing to see here move along".

Are they as good as Nvidia? No. News reporters have a tendency to hype things up beyond reality. No surprises there.

Are they useless garbage? No.

Can the quality issues be overcome with time and R&D? Yes.

Is being "worse" a necessary interim step to become "good"? Yes.

Are they motivated to become "good"? Yes.

Do they have a market that is willing to wait for them to become "good"? Also yes. It used to be no, but the US created this market for them.

Also, comparing Chinese AI chips to Nvidia is a bit like comparing AWS with Azure. Overcoming compatibility problems is not trivial, you can't just lift and shift your workload to another public cloud, you are best off redesigning your entire infra for the capabilities of the target cloud.