it still is a much better starting point than coming up with your own bespoke ISA, building a toolchain around it and convincing potential customers that your proprietary architecture is worth the effort to deal

There are lots of somewhat successful yet little-known Chinese companies with their own proprietary architectures and the toolchains to match, so I don't think it's that clear-cut. (That said, most if not all of them are somewhat MIPS/RISC-V-ish anyway...)

I do think 8051 is better when you don't need 32 or even 16 bits. Even 4-bit MCUs are still around in ultra-low-cost ultra-high-volume products, which is to say RISC-V is, as you said, just a different flavour of MIPS with very similar tradeoffs.