Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and the overall advancement of spaceflight in the US and China, has been beating online political pundits for a decade and a half now.
I remember posting replies in 2013/2014 in the Xenosystems blog about the first Falcon 9 water landing tests, with every political commentator saying that these will amount to nothing.
Even Jim of Jim’s Blog in 2018/2019 stated that China’s first small landing rocket prototypes were just “toy rockets held together with duct tape.”