"...it wouldn't even be legal to buy electronics from China."
Huawei.
The geopolitical realities involving such surveillance and access to modern computers are beyond my competence to cogently comment on, but the IME and branded alternatives are real, and have access to all hardware at all times, and to all keystrokes and data before it's encrypted. Obviously before AI there was limited human capacity to access all data. AI has changed that. We're seeing the net locked down globally now, and I expect these to be the last months we can communicate at all - unless we can adopt Reticulum ubiquitously AND have some means of linking local mesh networks.
I see no practical way for that to happen at present, so I am preparing to lose access to the internet.