Of course severity matters. Someone who gets a speeding ticket every single day of their life is still less of a criminal than someone who commits armed robbery just once and never breaks another law.

I agree severity is hard to measure, but that's not a reason to ignore severity and compare something that's easy to measure but uninformative.

In the absence of numerical measures of severity, there's room for opinion. My opinion is that the Great Firewall or Chinese IP theft are more severe infractions than tariffs or protected industries.