Before WW2, there were those in the US Navy that believed the Japanese couldn't see, couldn't shoot and certainly couldn't fly.
It didn't turn out that way.
There are lots of examples of like this in history.
That's fantastic now what evidence did the U.S. to have back that up? Because it wasn't looking at IJA/IJN flight schools!
It's a bad idea to assume your opponent is incompetent.
If the PLANSF is competent, they aren't good at showing it, but maybe they'll suddenly find immense discipline which they've shown to be lacking in an even more pressured environment? Or, perhaps like every other military in world history, they will need to actually take the time to produce well trained and disciplined crews led by good, intelligent officers.
They're slowly solving the hull problem. They've yet to solve the crew problem. Check back in a decade if they haven't been destroyed!
The PLAAF is scary because they're roughly equivalent in flight hours to the USAF at large but have far more industrial backing. This is a recent development, since the end of the Afghanistan War, actually. The PLAN is somewhat formidable in surface units but this is heavily counter-balanced by the JMSDF and US submarine forces. The PLANSF has always been the red-headed stepchild of the PLA and never received much in the way of good budgets or allocation of resources.
They only started to fix it around 2018, with the development of the 039C and an evolved rafting scheme of the 039s, and the deployment of the 095 SSNs, which has only just begun but seems to be a submarine they might actually make in quantity. Both solve major acoustic problems that crippled the PLANSF for the past 30+ years. As far as USN sonar operators are concerned, their crews remain a major weakness to this very day, but I guess literally being able to hear them being loud isn't good enough for you lol.
It's only in the past 5 years or so that the hull issue has been slowly rectified. It'll probably be another decade before their submarine crews are halfway competent and crewed by decent tactical officers, because their crews were being masked outside of close range by the loudness of their reactor pumps and other machinery noises, so they never developed a culture of discipline in the submarine forces.
The bad officers still have to be forced out, and they still need to make the submarine forces an attractive career prospect, which they haven't yet done so. They have about 28 months to fix these problems, going by DON estimates (August 2027), which is more like a 60-120 month problem (the 095/09-Vs have been programmed since the mid-00s actually!) but the ball is really in their court here to be fair.
The PLA can literally sit on the Mainland until 2050, produce zillions of ships and subs, and come out with a fleet of eight Type 004s, a dozen Type 075s, 30-40 095s, a dozen 096s, 40-50 Type 055s, 60-70 Type 054Ds, and like 30-40 039Cs and make America really sad if they want to, but then we're not talking about weapons. We're talking about industrial outputs and of course the PRC would win a peacetime arms race since they're the world's factory.
