It's just a personal general (and likely not very popular) impression, but the Japanese 'weeb' culture and its influence have been declining for years while the Chinese seem to understand what made it popular and are increasingly able to not just pull off cheap imitations. At this rate, as more original works come from the region, in the next years it might even start becoming attractive to learn Mandarin (from an utilitarian perspective it already is, putting aside possible dystopian futures).

When I started learning Japanese more than 20 years ago due to my interest in Japanese-only games and visual novels, as well as prior exposure to tons of anime and manga, Japan dominated what came out of Asia to the West, and the country was culturally very strong.

I'm still strongly biased towards Japanese media, but nowadays circumstances are different I'm not sure if younger generations in the West are culturally influenced from it like I was many years ago. So, to answer the question, if I was 20 years younger today, I don't know if I would be motivated enough to learn Japanese from scratch.