A full analysis of China's foreign policy direction and recent missteps is very complex, and there's a lot of contributing factors to why they are seemingly so out of touch now.

A lot of the current set of responses are a result of ongoing foreign strength projection that started over the last 5ish years after Xi's power consolidation. Launching Wolf Warrior diplomacy, etc. Chinese politics are pretty slow moving and once some of these trends got started, it is hard to reverse course even though these tools are very ill-suited to 2020's events. COVID, HK, and higher attention on China issues accelerated a lot of the pressure points of their foreign policy, and since their response has been to stay the course with strength projection, it can look comically out of touch from the outside.

Furthermore to your question specifically, while a lot of the Chinese leadership are fairly well educated, the rise and fall of cliques and power groups in the government matters a lot. Xi himself is a strongman leader from the Provincial governance side of the party, and has elevated a lot of similarly strong-handed members from the provinces and military. The "reformist" technocratic cliques within the party haven't actually been that ascendant not vocal in setting some of these more aggressive policies. There are exceptions but I'm generalizing for sake of space.