I gather you've never seen the print edition of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Epoch_Times

or suffered through endless advertisements for Shen Yun.

Edit: according to above, they've pivoted somewhat in terms of their political stance and direction since 2016.

Apparently Doctor Strange 2 ran afoul of censors for neglecting to scrub out an Epoch Times newspaper box that appeared briefly in a scene shot on location in New York.

I have. Shen yun are Taiwanese and really big on the KMT above and beyond the typical dance group, while epoch times is run by Falun gong people. Both dislike the ccp for their own obvious reasons. (Epoch times pivot to trumpland is an obvious play for them, works way better than natsec libs).

I wouldn't credit them for mainstream media's turn, though. We need a big bad and afghan goat farmers weren't cutting it.

Blaming "Chinese" or "China" looks like racist in recent years so people want to blame the problem itself: CCP

What's the problem with them, specifically, that wasn't the exact same in say 2015 when they got no press?

US was too late to realize threat of CCP IMO (from Asian view)

What threat? Are they going to storm DC?

If the threat is "they will be more powerful than the US within like 100 miles of their borders", I can understand concern on the part of Taiwan specifically but it's a little greedy for the US to need every single inch of the oceans..

I too noticed a drastic ramp up in anti-China headlines at a certain point in the early part of the Trump administration.

The shift was not exclusive to the media though. The US state department pivoted and went as far as removing active terrorist groups executing attacks near (Afghanistan, Turkmenistan) and in Western China, that the US itself was bombing, from the US terror watch lists.