Man, you guys talk as if you have not ever seen shitty western fiction.
The thing with online publishing is that there’s little to no editor, and no content filter. Anyone can write anything with the minimum amount of success, and they’ll continue. The fact that it still had an official English translation means that an equally big amount of English speaking viewers like this shit. It’s a genre. People just trying to make the quickest buck over a topic they see is popular elsewhere. That’s why you see so many copies of the same thing. You had the same thing with harlequin romance novels. Isekais for japanese light novels/webnovels. It’s junk food, not a 5 course meal. There’s no need to ban what it essentially the equivalent of wattpad fiction.
Not that I’m defending the quality of this, or most series. Or the hypocrisy. There’s just a lot of people in China, it’s not too hard to keep bad series afloat, and with more people, more shitty series.
In return, some of them are actually excellent. There’s not just a “handful” of good series, but many of them get shitty adaptations. Some of them aren’t mainstream. Some of them are not translated. Some of them get shit translation. Etc. It’s fairly easy. What type of series do people like to read in the west? Those gets translated. It’s the same principle that makes Sword Art online so popular.
Recommendation: I feel like you might enjoy Fire in Nirvana. It’s based on a webnovel but there’s a drama on that. Was ranked as top of the country that year. It’s not Xian Xia, but MC uses his brain. A lot, since he can’t fight anymore.