Which specific system were your coworkers talking about? One of those run by private financial companies like Alipay or WeChat pay? One of the small-scale experiments run by various municipalities? The country-wide blacklist of people who did not comply with a court order to pay their debts? Something else?

"The" social credit system looks very different from the monolithic apparatus of totalitarian control that people imagine it to be, so many different views can be simultaneously true.