Well the current thinking is that while carriers have a lot of utility in power projection, they’re made redundant against entities with hypersonic missile technology. So in the theorhetical situation of a hot war between China and the US that doesn’t go straight to nuclear apocalypse, the Carrier battle groups will be immediately irrelevant as they’re too easy to blow out of the water.

So Chinese Carriers aren’t a direct threat to the US. They’re a threat to its ability to intervene with impunity. A symbol of the end of a unipolar world order.