I think part of the problem was many/most previous models coming out of China were trained on eval data to cheat in the rankings. Quite an uphill battle for Deepseek.
Assuming that is true, which I don't have a reason to believe otherwise, only gave an excuse to the average reader to disregard without reading more than the title.
You can see a similar bias in academia with work originating outside EU/USA.
before someone thinks something strange regarding me, I can only tell you I'm not chinese, but Argentinian :)