Took Spielman's spectral graph theory class back in the day. Was really cool to see the professor engage with students on open questions that pushed at the boundaries of research!
Maybe ask a friend who lives in China or a friend who has friends that live in China? They're also subject to fake news, but at least they can give you their experience of what daily life is like where they live. It's not like China is so locked down that it's impossible to communicate with their citizens.
I don't think it's really that you lack imagination; it's that the human condition is quite universal in a lot of ways so the insights you gleaned were not particularly novel. But the real value is in actually taking the insights to heart, rather than dismissing them as empty platitudes.
To be fair, the scoreboard in the post displays the success of the deploys too, which would address the third and fourth point. But of course, people can still game the metric with a ton of insignificant incremental changes that don't do anything.
"Customer can temporarily cache latitude (lat) and longitude (lng) values from the Directions API for up to 30 consecutive calendar days, after which Customer must delete the cached latitude and longitude values."