Planning to do it soonish, vs ‘must do it immediately and a 100 billion dollar industry is on the line’ are pretty different looking endeavors IMO. It moves up timelines and forces reprioritization of funding and other resources on a massive scale.
Still might not work though, and with this ban it makes the stakes much higher for China if it doesn’t.
China were planning wasn't the right word. It should be "they were already dong it" . They burned through 100 Billion ( USD ), NAND and DRAM are coming up soon, although whether they are competitive remains to be seen. When DRAM and NAND were extremely pricy they could afford to have low yield, low quality NAND and DRAM and sell it at break even, now the market is back to "normal" they are back to where they were. All of that was from 2013 - 2018. Way before Western Media even had their radar on the industry.
Doesn't make any difference, China was planning to do that all along years before, with or without the sanction.