If stakeholders can manipulate the network to ignore a chain with more work, you’ve kind of undermined the whole proof-of-work thing and conceded that Bitcoin is ultimately subject to politics just like any other financial system.

Semantics, semantics, semantics, that's all your arguments are.

Soft and hard forks are a defensive mechanism against 51% attacks, essentially making them an always losing proposition outside of the immediate-term where the attack is occuring, because the attacker has to expend so much money, and then a simple code change could revert it, which would likely happen in consensus for the network if such a malicious attack would occur. Hence, no rational actor will likely even consider a 51% attack.

China can rinse/repeat on any soft fork. There is also the ability to block crypto networks at the ISP level.