you first

An interesting aspect of all this is, that some of the largest tech-companies in US are centered around perfectioning products which funnel attention from users and turn it either into (ad)money (or frankly an abundance of corporate noise).

At least some of this might have also affected productivity of the own staff I suppose.

But now a large part of the tech-economy depends on this business model, so how to resolve this?

He has a point.

Chinese work culture is pretty much 24/7 and extremely fast and reactive. It's not just 996, it's that something might pop up at any time on any day and you're expected to respond quickly.

That's one of the reasons why they blew European car manufacturers out of the water: Chinese manufacturers move and adapt massively faster. Before that it's one of the reasons why Huawei destroyed Western telecom companies.

I don't think the vanity metric of "US #1" is worth joining (or rather, sustaining) a race to the bottom in terms of quality of life.

I guess I just don't care enough about competing with China to be willing to sacrifice my life for tech companies.