What's fascinating here is his dad didn't actually hold him to the standard of being as good as Wei Wuxian, in the sense of like. Accomplishments.
That was Yu Ziyuan's hangup, which Jiang Cheng pretty naturally wound up acting on in his father's direction as though if he just Performed Well Enough it would solve things. But there's no evidence that Jiang Fengmian would have behaved any differently if it was Jiang Cheng who was the genius and Wei Wuxian merely very good, or even if Wei Wuxian had been as incapable as Jiang Yanli.
Because his favoritism hinged on 1) who he liked as a person and 2) who seemed to actually need his protection. (Also 3 who thrived in response to his parenting style, which wasn't even really favoritism it just had the same effect.)
Jiang Cheng's father does not seem to have demanded or expected he do any better than he did, as a cultivator or scholar or any of that, or to have been disappointed in him in that regard. He did take his accomplishments for granted, in an 'of course a-cheng is succeeding' way that isn't great parenting, but wouldn't by itself have been very harmful.
No, Jiang Cheng's dad held him to the standard of being 'as good as Wei Wuxian' ethically.
Which was still a whole can-of-worms unfair in a lot of ways, because Wei Wuxian's tendency to act recklessly on his principles that Jiang Fengmian encouraged is damn stupid a lot of the time, and it is very often quite difficult to tell whether Jiang Cheng not doing that is 'common sense' or 'being a prick.' Sometimes it's both. Often, even.
That time in the Xuanwu cave, when Lan Wangji and Jin Zixuan both refused to step aside and let Wen Chao take Mianmian, and Wei Wuxian tried to get involved and Jiang Cheng held him back--that was a really difficult situation. Jiang Cheng cannot be said to have been wrong; his concerns were well-founded and he had reason to see himself as the person responsible for making the politically sound calls.
He was, however, prioritizing his own interests and the protection of his own people over any sort of broader moral principle. And his father prefers the broad principle.
His father goes on to run headlong into a battle that was already lost, and die pointlessly.
There is exactly one moment where we see Jiang Fengmian breaking Jiang Cheng's heart in real time, besides when he runs off to die. It's when Wei Wuxian wakes up having been rescued from the turtle cave, and Jiang Fengmian comes and says completely appropriate supportive things by his bedside.
And Jiang Cheng, who has also been through a grueling emotional ordeal and also pushed himself as hard as he could and succeeded, is overwhelmed with jealousy. Because he only ran for help unarmed through enemy territory, he didn't kill a legendary monster. He only got in his first deadly fight with other human beings, he didn't come within a hair of physically dying from his wounds.
And his father may or may not have acknowledged his suffering and accomplishments at all, but if he did it wasn't enough, it wasn't like this; he didn't find it emotionally fulfilling.
And it's impossible to say how much of that was because Wei Wuxian overshadowed him by being more impressive and actively in more danger, and how much of it was because his father just...isn't as emotionally invested in him.
(And for that matter to what extent it's because Jiang Cheng's unfulfilled need for validation is so severe at this point almost anything would leave him wanting. This is a big issue in relationships of all kinds but especially parenting; by the time a problem becomes obvious the reasonable actions that could have prevented it developing are no longer sufficient to resolve it.)
So he lashes out about it, and gets a technically appropriate ethics lecture that is incredibly unhelpful wrt the actual problem. Wei Wuxian tries to jump in and redirect the conversation, because this is a pattern of communication fail he can recognize, although he's as helpless as anyone else to actually fix it.
And then Yu Ziyuan comes in. And most of what she says is demonstrably wrong. And none of it is kind to Jiang Cheng, because she is never kind to Jiang Cheng. But she pulls very hard for Wei Wuxian's heroic impulse being wrong, and therefore Jiang Cheng's caution being right.
This backhanded validation doesn't stop Jiang Cheng from being ashamed of his own priorities under fire, any more than being ashamed of it allows him to be the sort of person who doesn't worry about consequences. It's something, so of course part of him clings to it.
But at the same time, he can't fully believe it; Wei Wuxian being better than him is true enough that he can taste the denial through even heavy doses of anger.
Years later, when Wei Wuxian has put him in a shitty position by murdering fellow cultivators to steal POWs and he's been woken up from the first actual night's sleep he's gotten in weeks to deal with it, and he hates. That moment is in continuity with this moment, in Wei Wuxian's bedroom, probably one of the last times his whole family was in the same room together, all of them displaying their personal ways of failing him.
The Jiang Cheng who turned on Wei Wuxian and called for his death is the same person as the Jiang Cheng who fell to his knees and begged his mother not to maim Wei Wuxian. He's just one person. But he's also fighting himself so much of the time.
Which brings us to the crux of why, I think, he has such a self-doubt and freezing problem.
Jiang Cheng's self-sabotage is only partly because his parents' expectations were too high; it's also because his parents gave him standards to live up to that contradict one another. He cannot perform to both standards at once. He will always be failing one of them.
And he loves them both, and he respects them both, except when he doesn't, and his mother is crueler and more unreasonable but she's also the one who is at least in principle on his side, and who went around grouping them together rhetorically when picking fights with his dad, so his identity is heavily inflected by his consciousness of himself as her son.
But of course being his father's son is also an enormous part of his identity, it's basically legally mandated.
He has to choose whose value system to prioritize every single time he makes a call with any emotional or moral weight. Of course he suffers from paralysis!
When he and Wei Wuxian are acting in concert, he's mostly his father's son. His mother's influence is always visible, but when he's acting as half of that pair and feeling secure in that relationship, he knows himself in the context of Yunmeng Jiang and its values, and is less likely to second-guess himself. This is the happiest form of Jiang Cheng, even though it's never free from the poison of his insecurity, of remembering how Wei Wuxian is more worthy of love than him, is better at being this thing they are both trying to become.
Similarly, when he turns firmly against Wei Wuxian, he's acting as his mother's son and cleaving primarily to her principles, even though his father's are never absent from him; this too allows him to act without hesitation and second-guessing. He throws himself into the narrative frame Yu Ziyuan put on their family, and in many ways it sucks, but at least under its terms he's entitled to put himself first and not hold back.
Like you say, op, he's extremely effective in this mode; unfortunately in he's also definitely more harmful to himself and everyone around him.
So it's not just that Jiang Cheng holds himself back as a result of doubt; even when he picks a side he's impairing his own access to the character traits bound up in the other self-narrative.
I think in some ways despite how horrible it was, the war was the most emotionally straightforward period of Jiang Cheng's life; it was a situation where he could bring all his strengths to bear on the problems before him. All his wrath and all his loyalty, all his pride and all his honor, brought to bear on a single point.
And his parents were dead, so they couldn't tell him he was doing it wrong.
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