This all looks like a coordinated campaign by the US and corporate media to make China look Islamophobic.
The article, moreover, contains something of a non sequitur. The terrorist attacks it cites are from before the terror attacks. So at the very least the approach the CCP used between that time and the concentration camps was sufficient, and the recent escalation insufficient.
It is also worth asking why the Uyghurs became violent in the first place. China was one of the powers that opposed the Soviets in Afghanistan; this, of course, involved the creation of a violent Islam to oppose their rule. The Strike Hard campaign was not obviously born of necessity; the 90s were not a time of substantial strife. Terrorism is something of a weasel word; the use of violence is fairly common and oughtn’t to render an entire people pariahs. Moreover the CCP response is grossly disproportionate—the detention of millions in response to terrorist attacks on the scale of, at most, thousands, is entirely unjustified.
As for the use of “separatism” as code for “a priori bad”, this usage is entirely unjustified.
It is quite plausible that the Americans are not acting benevolently. That is not an excuse to ignore the plight of the Uyghurs, documented by others.¹
0. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/12/how-russi...
1. https://jamestown.org/program/xinjiangs-re-education-and-sec... — on the nature of the campaign; https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/05/01/chinas-algorithms-repr... — on mass surveillance.