Yeah, those aren't .com era garage startups
I've slept at work, lived on pizza, and "Saved the Company", I even got promoted for my trouble.
That's not what this is. This is forced labor pure and simple. This is rolling the clock back to time of the shirtwaist fire. No surprise then Foxcon put out a "business as usual" notice. You and the Chinese government can try to sell that line of nationalism all you want. It's nothing but window dressing for a long simmering problem, where both Chinese companies and the government want the Chinese people to turn the other way while an increasing part of the population is forced to toil in intolerable conditions and without safety or autonomy.
Foxcon made an empire using labor practices that have been clearly shown to be international human rights violations. It was doing it for quite a while before Xi came along as the new prime mover in China. He has only stopped those practices as a method to bring down and control businessmen that threatened his control of the party and the nation, and copied those practices and worse in the forced labor camps that became the hallmark of his administration. Camps providing slave labor to the companies of his supporters, I must point out.
Fold or win is a false choice, the game for the laborers in these factories is lose/lose. The only choice is to delude yourself about the reason they are making you do what they say, and preventing you from doing what you want and need for yourself and your family.
For our part, the average westerner was happy to turn a blind eye to all of this, as were many Chinese business people. But your second point fails as well, as the attack on Chinese workers rights predated Xi's nationalism, and followed his symbolic scapegoating of the Chinese robber barons who took advantage of the previous decades. Your appeal amounts to "shut up and ignore the exploitation of forced labor and military expansionism while it undercuts the global economy or we'll blame it on you for complaining"
Lastly, the reason this is happening is that Xi realizes how hard Russia is getting bit by western sanctions, and is terrified the same will happen to his regime. Not because it will likely remove him from power, old age and cancer are still more likely there, but because they will end nationalist and expansionist dream he as been selling, and force him to defend his regime, instead of attacking other. He will be trapped in a receding and declining nation for the remainder of his days, with no place to flee to, watching his personal empire crumble dust as his nation struggles in isolation or war. A war with no winners. A war of his making, a war he chose over other alternatives.
The one thing I agree with is the student visa problems, and only so far as it being stupid to train bright young people from around the world and then throw them out of the country because of a vague and pervasive sense they are somehow all spies, instead of just paying attention to them, and then treating the ones who actually are spies or terrorists like we have people who later turn out to be totally innocent. That shit's scary.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
