That's a lot of words to explain match up familiarity because that's exactly what it is. He's getting away with stuff because of a lack of knowledge. It's not his fault but rather the fault of the other players for not researching. Most of them probably have never labbed against Chun Li for a solid period of time.
6-7 years into the game and we still got a new puzzle to solve.
it's more than just labbing it out, which is what makes it annoying to deal with. dudes definitely go into the lab to try and figure out good ways to deal w/ it, but it's hard to translate that into live play. it seems so straightforward on paper but in action it's always gonna be a different deal- you're not really labbing out 'setups' but rather attempting to lab out a neutral situation that has an insanely wide range of possibilities due to the spacing. ryan's chun doesn't commit to shit- it's the equivalent of how noel's gameplan is to hold upback and wait for you to come at him while calling his assist w solid spacing/footsies. it's not something you lab out because it's so simple on paper, it's something you have to play out to figure out how to deal with.
the arizona and LV dudes that i've talked to for a brief bit about their exp. vs him all have varying answers and none of them are really "great" - the most common one was punishing morrigan assist as catching chun-li is way too hard while punishing morrigan is risk-averse. however, only certain chars can do that well as ryan calls morrigan in situations that will turn your char around if you try to punish her.
a lot of folks seem to miss that ryan's ground game is ridiculous as well so that plays a major factor into him taking advantage of folks thinking he's gonna just jump away all game in a one-dimensional manner.
i dunno, it's something where if i think about it in broad terms it seems super simple but when i start considering actual gameplay factors things get messy and veer into hard unknown territories really fast.
based on clockwork's results and why his team has so much success vs ryan my mind pretty much immediately goes to that super old variant of team scrub in wesker/vergil/strider as a potential counterpick but nobody really plays that anymore so welp