You always have to strike the right balance. In the case of Alibaba, even without government intervention they were already kind of stagnating, continuously losing ground to other e-commerce companies like JD and PDD, the latter of which seems like its doing what Alibaba never managed to do in breaking into Western markets, declining from being the top dog in Chinese e-commerce to simply only having
Taking the hulking machinery that they were and breaking off into six autonomous entities pursuing their own market and development goals, seems like a necessary step to allow for more flexibility and increasing competition.
But as always, even if business can't too big for its britches and threaten the state, so too can the state not be too heavy handed in controlling big business, less they wish to stifle competition, innovation, and drive up unemployment. You can't just kneejerk cut up a company just because it gets too big, since that destroys market confidence. And some big businesses like BYD, Baidu, Bytedance, Huawei, and DJI actually do have the right idea in investing in R&D to churn out groundbreaking technologies.
Of course, even if you're in charge of 1.4 billion people, you're still human in the end, so sometimes you get it right and sometimes you don't. Just got to pray in the end that wisdom and experience influence decision making so that they more often than not it get it right for the sake of fostering healthy development and innovation.
