There's clearly a western bias to the fact that before Covid the only thing that non-Chinese people knew about Wuhan, if anything (and I'm including myself in that), is that it's the Detroit of the Chinese music scene. I asked a colleague from Wuhan about it once and she said she had never heard anything about it at all.
That said, this morning Google Nest read me some variation of this story about how the indie live houses opening up again, and I was just glad that there was a national news story about Wuhan that was about anything other than Covid -- I guess this does also count as a "life getting back to normal" Covid story, but I'll take it.
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You are right. I suppose the US doesn't really have a good counterpart to Wuhan's thriving manufacturing industry and thriving music scene. I guess the closest analogy would be taking the Detroit of the 1950s and mixing it with the music of the Twin Cities in the 80s (Husker Du, The Replacements, and so on). Since Wuhan is a runner-up tier one city and Chicago is the second city it's probably the best point of comparison today
We could also compare it to Austin, but then again let's not.