>Now they learnt that Chinese can do marketing too.

Roborock didn't win because of doing marketing, they won by being technically superior and word of mouth, in spite of lack of marketing, at least in the west.

Same how Japanese cars beat US made cars in the 1980s even though US cars had the most amount of advertising in the media. Even Steve Jobs said in the 90s that US brands have the best marketing and win all meaningless "awards by industry critics", but if you ask consumers which products are best, they all say the Japanese ones.

Chinese products are now the new Japanese. I still have no idea why westerners assumed "Chinese can't innovate, they can only replicate".

It's not just marketing, iRobot basically stopped innovating. For commodity items like robot vacuums or pool cleaners, there is a relentless pressure to innovate. You can't simply coast or else you will soon find yourself left behind.

This is a good article to describe the viewpoint of Chinese iRobot competitor https://kr-asia.com/at-usd-90-per-unit-seauto-is-quietly-swe...

How many general public appliance makers out there have a competitive production line outside of China ?

As I understand the only countries where one could barely pull that off would be Korea or Japan, and the local makers are mostly giving up as they lose too much on cost.