>If China never sent that large balloon.. they could have sent a dozen more small ones and no one would have cared.. just like we never cared about the 3 during the previous administration.

But we certainly _should_ have cared. People want to turn this in a purely objective moral game. "Well we've spied on China, so therefore this is fine." If you think of it more in terms of war, you'd never draw such an equivalence: "Well, we've shot down their planes so it's fine that they shoot down ours." The advantages that China can take against us matter, and it's important not to be reflexively passive.