> On August 12 [2022], the US Commerce Department announced a multilateral export control on certain EDA tools, blocking China and over 150 other countries—essentially any country that isn’t a traditional US ally—from accessing them without specially granted licenses ... how has the industry become so American-centric, and why can’t China just develop its own alternative software?

See this video from asianometry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihz2WY-E2C8

It's mostly this part.

The fabs are using the EDA companies the same way PC manufacturers used Microsoft in the 1990s. There is only really one company for each particular piece of the EDA toolchain -- Cadence and Synopsys don't really compete directly now that they've run everybody else out of business (or bought them up). "Using" here is in the symbiotic sense.