This is a generalizable realization. If you’re aligned with any political faction, it’s best to assume that what you hear about other factions is more negative than the reality.
Why am I not surprised. A U.S. company designs a device that likely does not work but can be used to control people who think it works.
No orders come in, so let's donate it to a Chinese school for a pilot project in the hope that the CCP bites.
You should assume this is the case about everything that you have only read about without having long time personal experience. What we hear in the media about other countries or times in history is often basically a caricature of a reality that is way more complex and subtle than we usually are told. This is certainly true for China but also true for things like the Nazis or living under communism.
Reality is way more complex than we have time to learn.
Which I guess is a subsidiary of the US-based company BrainCo located in Massachusetts. The article describes the provisioning of the headbands as a donation, which I guess makes sense if you're a startup and you want to test a pilot program in a market that might be receptive to your product.
The fact that Chinese parents protest on social media and with the authorities (on ethical grounds, it appears from the Quartz article) and the authorities banned the device on privacy concerns, sounds a lot like what would happen in the West.
As an aside, every time I read an article about the Chinese society I discover a much more nuanced picture than "it's a dictatorship with no free press and human rights". It's not a democracy for sure, but the idea it's a totalitarian state where all dissent is banned seems very far from the truth.