Based on my reading artisanal mining has overall significantly reduced from ~50% to ~10% between 2014 and 2020, and during this period, China was equally if not more responsible for dealing with artisanal miners.

However, as of 2020, China simply does not deal with artisanal cobalt mining anymore (jokerfyingly presented as as “bad chinese company bows to pressure and ruins peoples livelihoods (while western ones still use child miners)”).

As of 2023 in fact, it looks like the West is leaning back into the direction of artisanal miners and child labour.

So in China’s defence, it does look like their mining operations are significantly more ethical. Though there’s still an argument for an exploitative nature of the deal, it looks like a better operation than first appeared.