They may have the manufacturing muscles but Ukraine has been able to develop and test their drones in live combat for years. There's nothing that propels technology forward as much as deadly necessity.
This sounds like it's dramatically under-estimating the Chinese engineers. If you take a drone today, like a DJI Mavic. Pretty much every single component of that drone is better than what we can do - at scale - in the West. It's not like we sent them blueprints and they mass produced the drones. Their technology is first class, arguably better than the West in the field of robotics.
