Be serious. HSR is capable of dumping half a million people per hour into stations that occupy less than 100 acres. In no way is eVTOL (which does not even exist!) a substitute good for HSR.
So yeah, I think the only unserious people are those dreaming of HSR in North America. Vast structural challenges and repeated high-profile failures don't seem to bring about any introspection or doubt, just more doubling-down. Privately built and operated eVTOLs fit smoothly into the structure of our society. Expropriating vast amounts of land to connect city centres while people live in the burbs does not fit nearly so well. Developing better batteries is vastly, vastly simpler and easier than restructuring all of society around fixed rail lines.
PRC air corridors are heavily congested - huge population concentrated on coastal regions + priority access for military aviation which also has to concentrate on coast for defense = massive delays for short hull trips that makes HSR come out ahead. Chinese military watchers occasionally joke that successfully invading TW and moving military aviation further out the 1st island chain would increase efficiency of domestic flights. Except there's probably some truth to it. Maintenance shouldn't be an issue, there's going to be low cost labour and extra infra capacity in PRC for a long time, even accounting for demographic concerns.
This is a very common mistake people make with California's SF-LA HSR. They say it costs a lot. We should just build airports. But they don't seem to know that airport capacity sufficient to provide as many trips as CAHSR will be capable of providing is estimated to cost over $300 billion, much more than the entire rail project.
2. Hsr only goes point to point, stops and door to door transport isn’t really feasible, and those last couple of miles take a lot of the time.
3. HSR is extraordinarily expensive in infrastructure costs and most city pairs don’t have the passenger volume to justify it.