I’m not disagreeing with you, I think Gochujang would improve the sauce quite a bit. But I could say the same thing about Nashville Hot in a different context. If it’s a big enough flavor that you’d have to list it on the menu, you can’t just use a small amount because people are expecting it to be hotter than it really would be. Non-spicy people wouldn’t buy, spicy people would be upset you didn’t put enough in.

As cooks, we don’t sell food we sell the idea of food. I don’t know where you’re from, but I’m assuming it’s the west. The highest selling Chinese food in America is General Tso’s chicken, a dish made from American takeout restaurants. The only Chinese guy that actually claims inventing it was a 1940s nationalist who had to flee to Taiwan during the revolution. So a shithead. Ironically, people in China also don’t like General Tso’s.

It’s not Chinese food, it’s the American idea of what Chinese food is. Sticky chicken/shrimp is probably the General Tso equivalent, a dish that isn’t meant to be authentic and is more of a signifier for “vaguely ethnic tasting sugary meat”. It’s like how most places that sell spaghetti have shitty spaghetti. It’s not that they don’t know how to make a good spaghetti, it’s that the customers want shitty spaghetti.