Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027

And we already know China has been backdooring other equipment: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

So yes, this is a small victory in a massive war.

The cost of that victory, according to the BBC, is a 1 year delay in the rollout of 5G tech.

That's a pretty large economic cost. Bob can't watch his medical lectures on the train, so ends up behind in class, Mary's company looses a contract to a foreign competitor because she got frustrated with her bad VPN and didn't read over the bid one last time, Fred couldn't afford the cost of the new 5G contracts so didn't get much data and ended up losing touch with his friends who were all group video calling eachother.

All these socio-economic costs cascade for decades or more. Do they really outweigh the theoretical ability for another nation to disrupt network traffic for a few hours until a mitigation is put in place?

Existing 4G LTE connections work well enough for those use cases you listed; users will hardly notice any difference on 5G. The real benefit of 5G will be in the new types of applications it enables.