Legogris

You see, technically speaking, Taiwan considers themselves to be the true seat of the Chinese government.

No, they don't. They are coerced into holding on to that stance officially, since China has made clear in the past that claiming independence will have dire consequences.

If China at some point in the future takes military action, they could technically claim it as a civil war / addressing an internal conflict rather than the invasion everyone knows it really is.

In 2005, the PRC passed a law saying that any of the following are triggers for military action:

• if events occur leading to the "separation" of Taiwan from China in any name, or
• if a major event occurs which would lead to Taiwan's "separation" from China, or
• if all possibility of peaceful unification is lost.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Secession_Law

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Apart from that important aspect, I think you're mostly right. With "toxic" not referring to how the ROC is acting or speaking but their unwanted status easily complicates things.

I used to live in Taiwan and when the topic came up I have never even heard of anyone truly believing that Taiwan should reunify apart from one guy's elderly father. The KMT holds the "we will eventually reclaim China" position, but most people seem to think that they've been corrupted by the PRC.

The only reason most other democracies don't recognize Taiwan is political pressure from the PRC. If you look at when various countries have changed their stance on recognizing Taiwan, it has always been correlated with strong economic incentives or coercion from the PRC.

An officially independent Taiwan is seen as a threat because they are a lot more complicated to invade, and might make Macau and HK get weird ideas of their own.

Random Swede here, just my 0.05 SEK: There is tension for sure, but I wouldn't say it's racial tension.

One one hand, conservatives and the political right are getting more and more vocal and feeling more and more comfortable with publicly saying things that would probably have you faced with a charge of hate speech just 10 years ago. People are saying out loud what they might have thought "everybody is thinking it but no-one is saying it" for a long time.

On the other hand, there is increasing resistance and reaction to this, primarily on the political left. People doing voluntary work; projects to increase understanding between different socio-economic, cultural and ethnic groups; political activism; the whole spectrum.

And an increasing amount of the population who are realizing the complexities of the issues while feeling nervous about that if we don't find new ways to work this out, the tensions between those two groups might escalate into something pretty bad.

Not OP but:

Firefox is not lagging behind in security features, as far as I know. Mozilla is pretty diligent in following up on security issues.

I wouldn't say Chrome contains spy-ware per-se, but it does dial home quite a bit, which is not nice.

I would recommend Firefox. Not only for the privacy parts, but Mozilla's part in keeping the web open and free can not be understated. If Firefox doesn't have a major user base, Google is free to do whatever they want. Alternatively, ungoogled-chromium and Iridium are forks of Chromium (the open-source project Google Chrome is based on) that has removed the Google-integration to stop sharing your data and behaviour with them. You can still install Chrome extensions.