That has been my experience too.

It will cost you more than it saves to use smaller Chinese models to code; because of the repeated work. That has been slowly changing recently, but with much larger Chinese models, however those models are so expensive they're much more price-competitive iwth the US competition.

But for actually providing end-user AI features, particularly simpler ones, the US isn't even in contention. The costs and limitations just outright kill those features conceptually.

That's what I lean towards with the exception that Gemma is also good on a lot of tasks and cheap, while not being Chinese.