German companies would suffer badly if they lost their Chinese customers.

This is just another crowdstrike incident in the making: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_outages

When dealing with hypocrites, whataboutism is the correct and logically consistent response.

People who complain about whataboutism are 99% hypocrites whose hypocrisy has been pointed out. And they have no rational arguments to defend their view other than deflecting the topic.