Most investments aren't to gain influence but to profit. At this time, there is no sign of Epic doing anything that could be explained by the alleged influence of the Chinese government, and as the majority owner, Tim Sweeney has the final say anyway.
The multi-billionaire owner with the backing of the Chinese government
Who cares about the backing if it has no effect on anything? I'm more concerned about Valve having a separate Steam client for China, censoring their games specifically for China and even reportedly banning for bringing up Winnie the Pooh.
They own Easy Anti-Cheat, which has kernel level access and collects data as part of its user agreement but these people keep regurgitating the debunked claim of the launcher being spyware. Occam's razor, anyone?
Epic: then we have no interest in having you on our service
If anything, the example you brought up proves the opposite. Darq is on Epic and its developer even took money from Epic to make it free, so there is no grudge even past the dev's publicity stunt.
Steam was literally forced on those who owned a physical copy of Half-Life and wanted to play it. The dominant position has nothing to do with the service offered by Steam. It was dominant when it barely had any features. GOG competing with it on features and in fact offering the bonus of DRM-free games hasn't improved its market share of about 0.5%.
What's your point though? Every one of Epic's exclusivity deals is done with the consent of the game publisher. Does it matter who makes the offer? Do we even know that there aren't cases of publishers reaching out to Epic?
You risk losing the audience when the other outlets' reviews are up days before the game release while yours will be published a week after the game release unless really cutting corners or reviewing a short game.
The Game Awards also treated it like a game. I think it's giving it special treatment. Some DLCs like Freedom Cry were available without owning the base game, but that's not even the case here.
Rocket League dropped its native Linux support to upgrade to DirectX 11. If the move to Epic were the reason and the justification is fake, why did the game also drop Mac support despite it being supported by the Epic launcher?
Previously, games like Rust and Valve's own CS 2 stopped supporting Linux and Mac without any store changes.
In the post I linked, they talk about issuing refunds and that the game is played well via Proton, so I wouldn't classify that as telling the users to get effed. And again, it's not unheard of for games and software to no longer support specific operating systems after a while. If you're a Windows 7 user, your whole Steam library would become unavailable unless you switch. Sure, you can upgrade, but a Linux player of Rocket League can also switch to the Proton/Wine version, which is even less drastic.
Upgrading to DirectX 11 and 64-bit is a valid reason. The Linux version would probably require a rewrite for the 0.3%. Compare this to Valve making Steam unavailable on Windows 7 despite it being used by 0.75% of their users.
Most investments aren't to gain influence but to profit. At this time, there is no sign of Epic doing anything that could be explained by the alleged influence of the Chinese government, and as the majority owner, Tim Sweeney has the final say anyway.