Its possible the client on your PC could be profiling your traffic and reporting back. That would likely end up badly for the parent company. But things like that aren’t unheard of and part of the reason I’m building my own router again. (See the ongoing GN LG coverage) Those sort of devices can spy on, and report back about other traffic on the network. If your smart devices are connected via Ethernet then they can likely see and read everything on your network that is unencrypted.
But a management console isn’t traffic snooping. Yes, you do have to trust the client to use it. They aren’t routing your traffic through them though. If they’re found to be spying it will be huge news turning them into a parriah in the IT and open source communities.
The problem with propaganda is that it generally only really works when there is a kernel of truth for it to be based on. Therefore you cannot simply completely dismiss something because it’s propaganda. And in this case it’s sort of whataboutism anyways.
China is easily as bad with misinformation and propaganda. Yet I wouldn’t dismiss everything they say out of hand just because of that. The problem with capitalists like China is that since the state has its fingers in all pies. It’s hard to prove that the state wasn’t involved in actions like this. Maybe it was the company doing this on its own. Maybe it wasn’t. Either way is still a bad look that China shouldn’t allow.