As one of those free-culture people, my complaint about DRM isn't so much that I can't legally copy the thing that I want to copy. My complaint is that legally empowering DRM has allowed non-creatives to abuse protections intended for copyrighted works to enforce basically any restriction that benefits their business model. e.g. DRM on printer cartridges, garage door openers, or OneWheel batteries is NOT LEGALLY ENFORCEABLE, but merely putting DRM on those things gives you the ability to legally harass lawful competitors for the decade it takes for SCOTUS to say "no, seriously, there is no copyright in your god damned battery DRM".

Furthermore, copyright does not protect all creators equally. There are access-to-justice issues in the underlying law, life+70 terms do not help anyone other than large legacy publishers, and the technical restrictions being implemented in the name of trying to make things easier on copyright owners also risks throwing out the entire concept of Fair Use on the Internet. It is very deeply accepted law in the US and other countries that when copyright and free speech are in conflict, free speech generally wins out. However, technical restrictions cannot adjudicate the law; and mandating technical enforcement by means that do not respect exceptions in the law is effectively repealing those exceptions.

This, collectively, creates a tiered system in which creators with better representation, deeper back-catalogs, or who create works that are less likely to be flagged by an upload filter are protected by the system, while those who are independent, getting started in their craft, or are just engaged in review or critique are treated as alien and suspect. The current system, inclusive of any proposed changes by the copyright maximalists, will not actually get photographers paid. You cannot represent every copyright dispute in court, and the technical systems intended to substitute for court representation are a mockery of the judicial process.

I will agree with you that a lot of people in the tech industry have a "kill and eat the creative class" mentality about them. Their obsession with NFTs - financialization as copyright alternative[0] - is a good case study of that. However, the distrust of copyright and patent law is not merely a matter of demanding free shit. It is learned behavior from decades of copyright maximalists downplaying or ignoring our valid concerns by insisting that if they didn't get everything they wanted, they would take their toys and go home.

As for China, they've done way more egregious shit than just not prosecute someone selling Disney knock-offs[1]. They do not have a functional concept of freedom-of-speech[2], and the fact that media companies will shit their pants about knock-off goods but stay silent on actual censorship indicates that their priorities are hella warped. Who cares what we are allowed to say, as long as we can own it, right?

And that's really just a microcosm of the whole problem with copyright maximalism. Maximalists don't care about the death of fair use online, as long as they can negotiate their way out of whatever upload filters they shackle everyone else with. They don't care about free speech as long as they are on the inside and know how to negotiate whatever rules are imposed upon them. To them, copyright is not something that protects small creators; it's something that protects them from small creators.

[0] Note: a lot of people who bought NFTs did not understand this, and either thought they were buying actual copyright title, or thought that "right-clickers" were literally stealing their work. This was a misreading of the (already-flawed) ideas behind NFTs; the idea was that you could sell artifically-scarce tokens representing an otherwise freely-shareable work. Thus, instead of holding a monopoly on copying and using your monopoly power to fund the creation of new work, you could just rely on selling unregulated speculative instruments to do the same thing.

[1] Also, under no circumstances should Disney be allowed to continue owning Mickey Mouse in any country - but that's a slightly different issue.

[2] Including the slightly watered-down concepts of "freedom of expression" in other countries. The differences are narrow enough that it shouldn't matter.