No, it’s not that simple.

Of course they can shoot down Western planes in a war. The question is how consistently and how many losses they would suffer in return. At the moment, everything looks like the Chinese air force is extremely poorly trained and, obviously, very inexperienced from top to bottom, which puts them at a significant disadvantage, even if we assumed - which I don’t think is likely - that their equipment is competitive with the West. There’s a reason they are trying to bribe experienced Western pilots to get some infusion of institutional knowledge.

Yup. Recording TV shows and movies aired on TV was far more common than copying tapes. No copy protection to worry about (although there were some attempts to prevent fast-forwarding over ad segments, IIRC) and you only needed a single tape mechanism instead of two.

Wow, that’s oldschool. I haven’t even thought about IRC for at least 15 years. How actively is this still being used in general?