Festivals could be real, the fake part is the amount of people joining and celebrating because they are forced to and not because they want to.
As in, Chinese government is running the country like a business and they are trying to make so much money that they will rule over the whole earth that, eventually they forget about making their people happy and gathering thousands upon thousands of people in places and paying them or even just forcing them to have fun is not really constitutes as a festival, surely there must be some people who had fun and celebrated because they wanted to as well but we all know how China literally tries to save face against rest of the world by constantly trying to show how "awesome" they are etc, which shows in this festival as well.
We all know that if we are talking about the new start of the year, there is also a Chinese new year that we are celebrating the year, and we all know that they are hard-working because they want to earn more money, but even they are celebrating those hard works and throw away the bad luck on their life and business still it depends on their skills to obtain more profit. Also though they are facing a lot of work and struggles in their jobs, still, they have some fun to celebrate their festive.