I suspect Chinese factories will get built first, but quality may take a few years to really nail down.

Basically:

China floods the market with cheaper but less QA'd parts, makes a gazillion dollars, is able to spend said money to fix yields / QA issues and streamline operations, by the time that happens Micron and maybe a few other existing players will have new memory production, and then we'll have a flood of cheap, reliable memory. 4yr, maybe?

They're doing decent enough already for consumer electronics. Corsair is selling 16GB 6000MT/s CL36 DDR5 sticks in China using memory from CXMT: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ddr5/chinese-memo...

How long would it take an aggressive company to expand production capacity? I always thought it takes a few years, at minimum, for even established players to stand up new fabs

It is not a law of nature that Chinese products are lower quality (cf. electric cars) and I don't see why they would go for that. They can just bin what they produce like everyone else and sell their products for what they have been tested to deliver.

But it is a near law that the first to market attempts will fully embraces the deeply engrained culture of 差不多, until market forces beat it out of the product line.

This has nothing to do about nationality, it has everything to do with building and running a brand new, highly technical, mass production facility.

And historical record of the lack of QA coming from Chinese manufacturing