It is the most reasonable choice when you get to disregard the long-term risks because by the time they are likely to manifest in a problem, it's no longer your concern anyway.
I don't think it's accurate to describe it as "loss of progress", either. It just makes progress more expensive. There's no reason why e.g. those support & maintenance jobs cannot be located in the same country, or at least a friendly one - it's not like there's something magical about China that makes Chinese inherently better at 5G maintenance. Nor is there any reason why the data centers cannot be run by different companies in the same country.
2. They designed the equipment that's being managed.
Those two reasons are sufficient on their own to make them inherently better at managing 5G networks. The first reason in particular is lost if you relocate the jobs to the west.
That's exactly my point. The first reason can be reformulated as, "security isn't free". The problem, of course, is that expenditures are immediate, while any mitigated attacks would be in the future. So any politician and any businessman who tries to solve it gets held accountable for the expenditures, and loses to competitors who just promise cheaper everything (and who won't even be there when SHTF as a result of those policies).
The second reason is largely the consequence of the first. There's no reason why that equipment couldn't be designed locally, either, except that costs of labor would be higher.
Tangentially I will also note that the main reason why costs of labor are lower in China is because the quality of life is so much shittier. I think it behooves us all in First World countries to consider what it really means for our societies if they truly cannot function without relying on the kind of cheap labor elsewhere that we made impossible in our own countries, largely for ethical reasons (labor rights, social welfare etc).
I don't think it's accurate to describe it as "loss of progress", either. It just makes progress more expensive. There's no reason why e.g. those support & maintenance jobs cannot be located in the same country, or at least a friendly one - it's not like there's something magical about China that makes Chinese inherently better at 5G maintenance. Nor is there any reason why the data centers cannot be run by different companies in the same country.