Despite Chinese wages growing exponentially, China's share of global manufacturing also grew in the same period.

Dialectics teaches us that real systems are never static, that they change over time. The western post-war model of industrial capitalism by the late 1970s had already ceased to be viable and entered into crisis. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall over time, which Marx correctly analyzed, had made it impossible to continue to maintain the high wage industrial economies and welfare states established in the wake of WWII as a means of placating the masses and staving off socialist revolution. There were only two ways out of this predicament: socialism or neoliberalism.

Of course capital picked the latter. And now things have deteriorated even further and even the illusory boom provided by the financialization glut of the 80s and the cannibalization of the industrial base which occured in the 90s has long since evaporated, at least since the great recession of '08 which in many ways is still ongoing. It is impossible to turn back the clock on capitalism and return to the pre-neoliberal model short of a global black swan event like a world war which would destroy much of the existing base of production.

It is very likely that the capitalist ruling class understands this otherwise unsolvable dilemma they are facing and the fact that on the current trajectory their situation will only get worse, and this is precisely why they are so frantically trying to accelerate the timeline for war with Russia, China, Iran, etc. whoever really just so long as they can get a sufficiently big and destructive war before it is too late and even this would no longer save them but only bring about their demise faster.

Unfortunately for them i think that we have already passed that inflection point and they just don't see it yet. Russia is probably the country that understood this first, hence why it dared to launch its SMO. Following that the Axis of Resistance in the Middle East seems to have caught on as well. Now it only remains to see what China does.

Sure, but neoliberalism is just a natural progression of the system, it's the negation of the negation :)

Neoliberalism was the natural evolution of the previous system so that it could keep satisfying the need of the ruling class.
Industrial capitalism was at it's end and we now that because the way a society is organized is decided by the social and economic condition of that society.
Labour was getting weaker and growth was stopping, so the system naturally changed to allow the bourgeoise to keep enriching itself as much as possible. I believe it's not good for Marxists to talk positively about past capitalist systems that lead us to our current situation, the road that history took was not random.