While this is true, China exporting these is not outside of the question (theres even been talking of exporting the J-31), and I don't forsee China being the on

While this is true, China exporting these is not outside of the question (theres even been talking of exporting the J-31), and I don't forsee China being the only country to do this - I'd imagine in the medium term India to develop similar technology to counter China and to try to resell it. Another thing about satellites is that you could plausibly sell them as a service, much like US AWACS and semi-commercial satellite imagery in Ukraine. At the same time, the F-35 itself is still not a finished product, it's still missing many of its core features such as full sensor networking and it's unlikely to ever be fully integrated at this pace (which the article doesn't mention - the software side of the F-35 program is still a disaster that doesn't seem to be improving as much as promised. Recently there's been chit chat about dependency hell and spaghetti code and the inability to even integrate new weapons platforms without breaking other subsystems) Beyond this, it's not clear that the F-35 represents that much of a leap against non-peer opponents. I'd say technically the program is still an overall success, but it's not really clear that it provides anything like a decisive advantage in any plausible situation.