The competing theory is that it was transmitted from living animals sold at a wet market in Wuhan.

Either story isn't a great look for the CCP: either they failed to maintain sufficient health protocols to keep diseases from spreading in wet markets, or they let a dangerous virus leak from a lab. There's no theory for its origins that have the CCP looking competent, so I'm not sure why it's such a politicized topic.

A lab leaking wouldn’t do any harm to the CCP. The harm they caused themselves was a mixture of lying and trying to cover up the whole thing. Downplaying it. Etc. The WHO says any unknown phenomena must be treated as airborn until proven otherwise. But they followed the CCP in telling us it was fine, it wasn’t transmissible.

I thought that was baseless speculation and the lab leak more likely explained it because it was in close proximity to the market.

That's still highly contentious, hence the "low confidence" the CIA assigned to their conclusion. There's apparently a lot of evidence for the zoonotic original, though I personally don't understand said evidence.

It has, since day one. The fact that the WIH was one of only 6 institutions in the world that had been conducting GoF research on bat-related pathogens before the pandemic gives such strong statistical evidence towards it that any theory holding the WIH is unrelated, would require very strong evidence. At no point has there been such strong evidence.