An intentional lab leak makes no sense to me at all. Its like starting a fire in your house to spite your neighbour.
Very few people are arguing that it was intentional. I agree that an intentional lab leak is highly, highly unlikely, but I think an accidental lab leak is at least just as likely as the wet market hypothesis and CCP certainly acted extremely suspicious.
All major world governments do illegal and shady acts when faced with situations that may result in the need for extreme ass-covering. (cf. "righteous strike")
If it were an accidental lab leak: so what? How does that change things? If anything, it would accelerate a {trade,cold,cyber,shooting} war with China, which is universally a bad thing, even in pursuit of justice for something that was likely accidental (if indeed it came from a lab, which is presently undefined/unknown to the public).
> pursuit of justice
It has nothing to do with a pursuit of justice, at least not for me. It's about understanding where the disease came from and how it jumped to humans, so that we have a better shot at stopping something like this happening again.
That's a more important question about whether or not this particular virus came out of a lab or not, because, if the answer to the above is "yes", then we need to take whatever your/whoever's proposed mitigation/prevention steps even if this thing came about via natural pathways. Even banning GOF research in labs might not be sufficient, if malicious people (wooo "bioterrorism") could go about doing this outside of labs.
Also, we need to plan and prepare for the next global respiratory pandemic in any event, as we know they happen periodically regardless of origin. That's true even if we never authoritatively understand the origin of this one.
While I agree with that, what this misses is that knowledge of if and how the virus escaped is valuable knowledge that helps us by showing us where the flaws in our current processes are.
Flight safety is a fitting analogy. You need to analyze exactly why a plane crashed so that you can see the gaps in current safety processes. It is that iteration (crash -> analyze -> improve -> crash -> analyze -> improve) over many generations that is why flying is so safe. Without this, it's armchair theory and you are not left with a system that is robust to the real world.
If it could be made in a lab and released (intentionally or accidentally), another could be made in a lab and released (intentionally), and our strategy should be exactly the same even if SARS-CoV-2 is of entirely natural origin, as the entire planet now knows the destructive value of this class of bioweapons (if constructing such artificially is within our technology).
The US ban on GOF research suggests that it is believed to be technically feasible to achieve this. This means we must proceed strategically as a species as if the lab leak hypothesis were true, because over time the probability of an intentional lab leak approaches 1. The origin of this particular pandemic remains irrelevant in that case.