The reality is 99% of this hardware is built in China and they all copy each other's designs without regard to intellectual property.

If the speedup was 2000% and all the hardware was made in the USA where patents are strongly enforced might be relevant but a minor 20% optimization is nothing we should be hard forking to avoid. Irrelevant - many design advances in ASIC, widely copied, have yielded far more than 20% boosts and Bitcoin has managed to survive.