Since the reform and opening-up, the migration of rural labor to coastal areas has led to sluggish economic development in labor-exporting regions. Later, driven by policy guidance and the financial crisis, and further supported by the development of small and medium-sized towns and strengthened policies after the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, returning home entrepreneurship has gradually become a trend. Enhancing county economic vitality is a crucial condition for sustaining the sound development of the micro-foundation of China’s regional economy. The pilot policies for returning home entrepreneurship have provided a policy opportunity for releasing the vitality of county economies. Existing studies mostly focus on the direct impact of returning home entrepreneurship on employment and income, with an emphasis on the national perspective. They rarely construct the transmission path between returning home entrepreneurship and county economic vitality, nor do they provide differentiated explanations for counties in central and western China. Taking counties and county-level cities in central and western China as samples, this paper adopts the “double machine learning” method to systematically evaluate the impact of the pilot policies for returning home entrepreneurship on county economic vitality, and analyzes the internal operational logic from four dimensions: “consumption, agglomeration, finance, and industry”. The research shows that the pilot policies for returning home entrepreneurship have significantly enhanced the economic vitality of counties in central and western China, and this conclusion remains valid after a series of robustness tests; from the perspective of the mechanism, the policies promote county economic vitality mainly through the paths of “boosting consumption, alleviating financing constraints, and advancing industrial upgrading”, while “the improvement of economic agglomeration level” has not exerted a significant impact on county economic vitality; further heterogeneous analysis reveals that returning home entrepreneurship activities in “regions with relatively high digital development levels” and “regions without high-speed rail access” have a more prominent driving effect on county economic vitality. The innovation and value of this paper are reflected as follows: Theoretically, based on the context of counties in central and western China, with the pilot policies for returning home entrepreneurship as the driving factor for county economic vitality, it reveals the county-specific transmission logic of “activating the local consumer market and optimizing the county industrial structure”, supplements the differentiated experience of the interaction between the two under the urban-rural dual structure, and provides a more accurate technical path for evaluating policy effects at the county level through double machine learning. Practically, it not only empirically verifies the significant driving effect of the policies on the economic vitality of counties in central and western China, providing empirical support for local governments to continue and expand these policies, but also clarifies that consumption growth, financial development, and industrial upgrading are the core transmission paths of the policies (the economic agglomeration effect has not yet emerged). It also identifies the heterogeneous characteristics of digitalization levels and transportation conditions. To a certain extent, this study provides a quantifiable basis for local governments to formulate differentiated policies and allocate resources precisely, and holds significance for academic exchange and practical guidance regarding the high-quality development of county economies in the background of “rural revitalization”. Meanwhile, it offers a directly referential policy framework for developing countries around the world confronted with rural labor outflow and insufficient rural economic vitality, provides a concrete reference for the international community to explore urban-rural balanced development paths that align with local realities, and holds important value for enriching the practical map of global rural revitalization and promoting cross-regional exchange of development experiences.