People are reading way too much into the Waymo incident. It was Chinese new year. There was a bunch of drunk people in the street. Somebody messed with the car, and then somebody else did, and so on. Until somebody threw a firework in there out of memetic one upmanship and it caught the thing on fire. You can see this in the videos. This was not ideological, it was just mob revelry gone awry.
You're missing the part where no one seriously wanted to stop it.
As you point out these kind of excess happen all the time at festive events, someone drunkyard will kick a car, steal a street plate or deface a poster. But it stops there, as a random mischief. People piling up on the same thing isn't random or just a natural behavior, and nobody telling them to just move on goes along that line.