Yes, there are 4 different types of spearman spears if I recall correctly–Chinese, Mongolian, French and the rest.
There is a very silly bug that has been reported multiple times and which should be extremely easy to fix (we’re talking about 5 mins of work). The bug basically is that the units of French, Chinese and Mongols only reveal their true weapons when they are charging.
The fix is just swapping their default weapons back to their original. This shouldn’t require messing with animations or anything that would break things, it should be as simple as changing a static mesh of the weapons they are holding. Despite how easy this would fix and how much it adds to the unit’s personality and identity, it is deemed unimportant and quoting a developer “will likely not be fixed soon”.
It sounds like they don’t have an art team on AoE4 anymore, or at least one that isn’t only working on DLC.
Here is a post by Ahioz9426 AOE4 model BUG collection (latest complete version) covering many visual bugs that have still going untouched.