It's also my understanding that this was also used as a means of dealing with supply and logistics issues in the country. If a remote rural village needed new tools in time for harvest season, it was unlikely they would arrive in time and the food would be lost, but if they had self-sufficiency and could manufacture their own tools, they could still manage well enough. Obviously it didn't work out as well as it was intended, but the western media often presents this as "dumb Communist China so primitive they use medieval methods to make steel." So I do think it is important to push back on that side of the narrative. There was a problem, and this was intended as a stop-gap solution to that problem.