Let me unpack this a bit. First off, do I think China invented this game? Not at all. Many colonial powers in the past used debt trap diplomacy. Hell, many corporations used a variant of this with their company money and company store model.
As for the World Bank and IMF, they don’t do debt trap diplomacy, which leads me to believe you actually don’t know what China is doing. They do other things, often trying to get political concessions, or change behaviors of nation states, but not debt trap diplomacy the way China is doing it.
I’ll look at this as a USAnian. Who says proxy wars are bad? It keeps the military-grade fighting off our own turf. The cheap way to wage war is to bribe, trick, coerce, blackmail, or otherwise persuade others to do your fighting for you elsewhere. It’s the Byzantine method; it worked for quite awhile. When militaries of major powers fight somewhere, their leaders fucked up by not enlisting proxies… or were themselves tricked or bribed into proxiedom. A smart, ruthless White House would trick our rivals into fighting each other, not fighting us. (I look around hopelessly.)
No, proxy wars are not good, not if you’re the proxy. Then you’re fucked. Proxy wars have waged since antiquity and won’t likely stop anytime soon. Pray for whirled peas.