Interesting. Seems China's run up against the limits of their hardware. The nice thing about a depot-based architecture, though, is that a lot of it can probably be used to serve even larger stages and spacecraft with minimal modification, if China ever gets around to building those. I think the equipment they already have can be stretched to a very quick, small asteroid mission, but that's about it before they need a new set of larger stages and modules.
I suspect the Artemis Program and the Chinese lunar landings will steal a lot of the cultural and research momentum that IOTL went to Mars--if there's a TTL analogue to SpaceX, they might be explicitly lunar-focused.
Any chance that NASA might follow up Shuttle-C with the bigger Shuttle-Z variant proposed IOTL, with the bigger fairing and large upper stage? Or is there really no need for it?
If developing nations like to use a manned space program to demonstrate their progress, is there any chance Ukraine might build its own manned spacecraft? They've already got Zenit, so the cost for them shouldn't be too great. On the other hand, that might just infuriate Russia too much.