>I remember at the very beginning people jumping from the fact that there is a lab in Wuhan

To be fair, at the time it was know that the Wuhan lab it was one of the leading two labs in the world working with bat and pangolin coronaviruses. They were genetically engineering and combining them and testing them in animal models. One of the primary investigations was modifying proteins so that they can infect hosts using human ACE2 pathway.