Would that affect ability or speed of associations?

I could imagine that typical associations occur due to being grouped together and being activated at the same time. Mitigating that in an attempt to reduce uncertainty would then potentially reduce the ability to quickly associate similar concepts with each other.

I'm not playing with semantics. "traditional Chinese medicine" is used to refer to a certain set of approaches, and many of those are not working. If they were working, there was no need to refer to them in a specific way as they would have been included into modern medicine. That's not only true for Chinese traditional medicine - you see similar issues all around the world. People are good to see patterns, and tend to see patterns where none exist. Scientific standards are required to overcome that, and traditional communities did not have access to those.

That does obviously not mean that all old traditions are not working. But again: those that are get simply included into our general medical knowledge and become or already are medicine by modern standards.

The reason why it's called "Traditional Chinese" is because most of it is not working. Otherwise, it would simply be medicine. But it's not for a reason.

And yes, of course, various modern medical knowledge is based on ancient research. But those things are part of "normal" medicine because they work. You don't need to look for "Traditional Chinese" to get those.

Medicine, Western or not, needs to be evidence-based. Meaning that you need to be able to scientifically measure success of what you are doing. If you can't measure any success, it's superstition and pseudoscience.

The reason why any alternative medicine - traditional Chinese included - is "alternative" is that it's impossible to proof any positive effects beyond placebo. In other words, it's not working. It doesn't have any effect.

I wouldn't be surprising at all if some doctors in ancient China got executed for reasons like that.

But it's essentially the same as in Western medieval ages. There were certain things doctor's knew how to do, and they actually managed to help - those are the things that got developed further into modern medicine. And then there was a bunch of stuff that people just made up due to lack of scientific standards. But nobody knew better, so they still did it, especially to noble families (as they could afford doctors). Think about blood-letting or cupping therapy.

I'd assume it's less a question of easing the immune response, as more about healing the damage that virus and immune response have dealt.

Typically, viruses infect cells, and the immune system identifies those cells and kills them before they can produce more virus.

I didn't look into the background of this, but there's certainly a possibility that not all of the damage is always reversible.