If it were Beijing, you'd have comprehensive action occur within a day or two and it would be a strict policy enforced by the government. All Chick-fil-A locations would be shut down immediately and whatever was upsetting would be removed (or the chain would never reopen); and while the authorities are at it, they might go ahead and engineer a forced ownership transfer for good measure.
I'll note that Chick-fil-A is booming in the US. It's now the third most successful chain in the US by sales behind McDonalds and Starbucks. That's despite their non-PC position on gay rights.
The image of English-speaking westerners talking about "liberate hong kong" is a bit triggering for the average Chinese person, due to Hong Kong and England's history. It must be incredibly easy for CCTV to point at that and say that it's just the western imperialists trying to take HK away.
China promised 50 years of "one country, two systems"-- people in Hong Kong want to cash that check.
The topic was whether the outpouring of sentiment from mainland China could be 'organic' rather than some immediate government dictate.
If someone in the US makes politically questionable speech, the fallout is stretched over days, and generally products aren't pulled immediately from retailers, etc. Here, we had many commercial actors respond at once (Alibaba, Tencent, Li Ning, China Basketball Association, etc.).
It reeks of state coordination and pressure, especially when Chinese government entities are making related contemporaneous statements. Even if it wasn't, it's overly reactionary; elsewhere, one tends not to immediately kill commercial relationships over a controversial statement by one executive, but instead see how the organization as a whole will react to concerns first.