Exactly, we see that western companies managed to go through these 3 generations in a few years, and there's no reason to expect that it's going to take China longer. If anything, I'm expecting China will be able to do it faster because the techniques for doing this are now known, and Chinese researchers know which approaches to pursue. Furthermore, nothing stops China from just hiring the researchers that were involved in developing western chips.

And yeah, the fact that China managed to create this whole industry domestically effectively overnight is incredibly impressive.