Ideally I'd like to 'hear' it from someone actually in/from socialist china but that's a tall order right now. Examples would be great too.
That's a little difficult to do. Not only is there a language barrier, but also because the CCP heavily regulates the information that reaches the rest of the world. Any news we can find is going to be filtered through Pooh bear's Pooh hole.
This is only speculation on my part, but the recent heavy handed regulations is an act of enforcing the party's power. A show of force if you will. While they might claim it's to promote fertility, it's really just an exertion of control over the populace. With their elections coming up (if you can actually call it an election) they want to clean up their image as much as possible. By stamping out adult content they can claim that they "cleaned up the filth, enforced our morals and laws, and boosted their birth rates. +3000 Social Credit. Patriotism." Even if it's total BS none of the citizens can actually do anything about it and some who aren't aware (because their media is so heavily regulated) might actually believe what they say. Take what I say with a hearty spoonful of fish sauce, since I'm not Chinese nor am I a scholar on Chinese politics. But the recent trends and general knowledge regarding the CCP is what I draw my speculations off of.
Note that the CCP didn't suddenly make a rule that bans porn, as it's always been there. They just choose when they want to enforce it/how they choose to interpret it. While the content producers might try to complain, they're not given any ground to stand on because the authorities can point at the law that was ignored for decades and say, "You didn't follow the rules so you get to go the the gulag." They decide when it's convenient to enforce the rules.