I think there’s a bit of hysteria here. Tiktok have completely separated their Chinese business and international one, with international server hosted outside China. Saying that data collection is funneled to CCP is like accusing any US company of _potential_ acquisition of foreign data by the US government. Or to rephrase, no Chinese business should have the ability to operate elsewhere because they are from China? I think it’s overboard and even somewhat hypocritical.
Nowadays it is very easy to have a front server with behind-scene server farms. You as a common end user without special tools just cannot see through, unless you are a genius script kid.