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I don't understand what you mean by topline, so maybe this comment is not a good response.
Anyway, China is going to be making a lot more missiles and drones than Iran, surely. Iran seems to have burned through much of the remaining US stockpile in a short conflict. US munitions production doesn't seem adequate for great power wars - see all these issues with shells.
(Also I conceptualize Korea getting dragged into a US-China war one way or another, so there would be a major ground element where shell production is significant)
I don't see what cause there is for optimism there is in waging a war of attrition against China. The US needs a cost-efficiency/qualitative advantage that existing weapons don't seem to provide. Otherwise it's folly to take on a power with 4x US population and many more engineers. A Chinese engineer is no worse than an American engineer, as time passes they'll have more breakthroughs in military or economic spheres. I don't think their political system limits Chinese competitiveness like the Soviets (see Lada vs BYD).
The US needs some offsetting advantage that can sustainably counter a fundamentally stronger opponent. I think AI/Space is the strongest option here. Turn the tables on engineer count/quality. Or lock down space, dominate the highest ground. Exploit a temporary lead to secure a permanent advantage.
You raised some qualitative edges in weapons systems but the Chinese already have similar systems in development. If America can make a missile, so can China but China will have more engineers to juice them up and more production capacity to produce them at scale, just by virtue of this huge industrial base and economies of scale. Unless the missile-edge enables the US to win in a pre-empting war then what good is it, it's only moving the goalposts. China can then jog closer and score, they're faster at running than the US is at moving goalposts (with the exception of space and AI).
It seems fairly plausible that South Korea will get dragged in to some degree or another (possibly below the level of kinetic action), but it's unclear to me what advantage it would be to North Korea to get involved kinetically. South Korean doctrine at the moment is built around "KILL KIM JONG UN" if the balloon goes up and I think the rational move from Kim is to try to extract concessions from both sides and basically nothing else. I am certainly open to alternative takes, but it seems common in Western thinking to assume that if China suggests North Korea jump, the North Koreans will ask "how high?" because they wear the designated villain hat, and I don't think actual North Korean decision-makers have any emotional attachment to being committed to being part of the Axis of Evil. I do think they have emotional attachment to not ending up as paste at the pointy end of a South Korean ballistic missile.
Again, you're sort of missing the main point here. The USA does not need to match China to win; it already has the "offsetting advantage" which is the status quo (and geography). China needs to overmatch the US of A because it is starting from a geographically disadvantaged position. I think that there is a good chance that China does nothing while the US painfully rectifies its munitions production and stockpiles issues over the next 5 - 10 years precisely because the risks of acting even when China is at the apex of its power relative to its potential enemies are still extremely high, and Xi does not want to gamble with his empire.
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