> If every VC company tries to pull you into their walled garden, I can still choose from among a variety of said walled gardens.

When they play it right, you're forced to choose all of them, or at least a significant subset of them, so that their partially overlapping offering add up to the actual thing you need.

The competitors at the consumer-facing super app level (with mini programs of varying awkwardness) include Meituan, XiaoHongShu, and to an extent, Toutiao, JD.com, and Baidu. But you don't need those gardens as a publisher if you're on Android--ironically because Google services are banned, there are over a dozen app stores to competing to fill the void. Compare that with the western duopoly of Apple App Store and Google Play.