I think that, due to the tonal nature of Chinese, and the replication of the same pronunciation by many different characters and meanings, puns are more likely to be used.
But, “creative misspelling” does have its own particular Chinese character and history. One particularly famous (if unintentional and perhaps apocryphal) example of this comes from the reign of the Yongzheng Emperor - 雍正 Yong Zheng , Harmonious Justice, reigned during the early-mid Qing dynasty, between 1722 to 1735. His time was prosperous, but he was kind of a paranoid guy.
At this time, the Civil Service examinations involved writing an 8-legged essay on some part of Confucius’ Analects. The student would get a prompt, and they would base their composition off of that prompt. Over time, it became more and more difficult to find new phrases from the Analects, so, examiners would have to get more creative and choose increasingly obscure and tiny snippets of the Analects. One examiner, Cha Siting of Zhejiang Haining, in the 4th year of Yongzheng’s reign, assigned this prompt to his students:
维民所止… “Weimin Suozhi” (For the people… ). Perfectly Normal exam type question, right? But look at the first character in Yong zheng, Yong, and the first character in Weimin Suozhi, Wei.
Yong —> 雍 维 <---- Wei
Notice how they are almost exactly the same, except that the top part of Yong, the head, is missing from Wei! Now, I know some people might just say that was a coincidence… Until you see the comparison of the character for Zheng from Yongzheng and the character for Zhi from the exam question:
Zheng —> 正 止 <— Zhi
Again, the character is missing its head! Clearly, this was a call from Cha Siting to behead the Emperor. Cha Siting was duly executed himself for this treason.
I am not a Chinese speaker, but I imagine that this type of creative misspelling happens today. There are also a bunch of websites you can find on Google for “Chinese Internet Slang” to see what the kids are doing with the language if you want an equivalent to leet.