let's first address the heart of the matter, as i've said in a few comments: i think it would be great to have an explanation from china on what the hell is actually going on in xinjiang, and if those claims are correct, i obviously think that policy is atrocious. it's still not a genocide, of course, as there is no planned extermination. it's not just "not to the extreme level of the holocaust". it just isn't a genocide. it doesn't have to be a genocide to be despicable.
on the data: if by "we" you mean adrian zenz then you're out of luck when it comes to quality. i'd like to see better sources than someone who thinks he's in a mission from god like he's the blues brothers. china hasn't done "a great job" at framing the west for lying otherwise there wouldn't be a wikipedia page and we wouldn't be discussing this on hacker news. the sad reality is that china doesn't give a shit about its reputation abroad, which is why many of the rebuttals to those claims are in chinese. one is here: https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/13029926735409111... – it's by the chinese state media so one can still claim they're lying.
on the "cities that were once heavy uyghur communities ..." as i mentioned above: kashgar still has a lot of uyghurs. they go to their mosques and so on.
what is true, however, is that china is encouraging resettlement of han chinese (they've been doing it for decades), for the sole purpose of making the uyghurs a minority in their own land. this is something that personally i don't like, but (here comes the whataboutism) i have not seen a single piece of criticism when this happened literally everywhere else, minus of course when it was accompanied by planned extermination, which only applies to anatolia's christian minorities, as the jews were already a small minority in the locations that were affected by the deportations.