And we know that we didn't detect the virus early, it didn't originate in the wet market event. That market event was just big enough right in the middle of Wuhan so it made it unmistakable.
The only way you get that high of an affinity is through serial passage through actual humans, not through the lab.
And this should not be that surprising since we know that it takes several months for the virus to spread before it starts to cause massive numbers of deaths, the IFR is actually low compared to SARS-1 and MERS, and it tends to spread asymptomatically and undetected.
We know pretty much for certain now that it was spreading cyrptically in the area around Wuhan in Nov, and I would bet that the zoonotic jump was Oct or earlier.
And that is also why I suspect an intermediate animal with a more similar ACE2 to humans like minks being involved. So serial passage through one of those animals to get it close, followed by serial passage through humans to refine it.
Mink seem very unlikely to me, since I've seen papers reporting evidence of host adaptation on mink farms:
https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/7/1/veaa094/6025194
So if the virus first evolved in mink, it would have to have evolved enough in humans not just to favor human ACE2 but also to lose its affinity for mink (to the point it has to regain it later), all during that couple months of cryptic spread.
And do you really think China is doing a bad job looking for the intermediate host? I don't think that's impossible--for example, the true origin could be some agricultural practice so horrible that they consider the present uncertainty better than disclosing that. Lab origin has become strongly associated with anti-China political sentiment, though. (That seems stupid to me, considering that the USA was funding the WIV; but here we are.) So I'd be surprised that the CCP would pass up a chance to disprove that.