Energy costs money in China too, they still have coal plants and crazy energy cutback mandates every once in a while.
The truth of the matter is that you need the user interactions from the free model to train and that value cannot be understated and if you are playing catchup, then it's a must. No one would use the Chinese model if it was a shit service.
Improvements to the UI & lossless editing are nice, 20 years too late, but nice. Outside of that we are still 19 years behind PS, feature parity is impossible, anywhere near the same productivity is impossible :/
Feels like the foss community is a bit unlucky with gimp, there are so many truly great productivity tools outside of this one area.