I'm not even sure Taiwan makes that claim, but if they do then I’m fine with that.

They do. The official government line currently is that they have no need to formally declare independence (which might trigger a Chinese invasion) because they already are an independent country by most meaningful measures (which is true of course)

I had heard they view themselves as the legitimate government of a (unified) China.

That used to be the official position decades ago. But apart from a few old nationalistic farts maybe, nobody on Taiwan really holds that position anymore.

Instead you left people who trusted you dangling, only sporadically feeding them promises you would never fulfill.

Now, you see, this is the part that I as an uninvolved observer who's just now catching up on the happenings do not get. Promises that were never fullfilled?
How long has or hasn't this actually been an issue? Because from what I can see looking at the codeberg commits, it seems like development stalled for how long, like a month or so?

I totally get not wanting to be left hanging and having some answers and pathway for how contributions can happen. But as you also agree on, I also get real life being more important and getting in the way sometimes. And in that sense, being out of it for a month or so does not exactly seem like an earth-shattering amount, even if it's annoying when it happens to be the project lead and not much can happen.

I just can't help but feel like all of this has been pretty impatient and premature, which also makes it hard for me to really understand the point of the fork, even if I can relate to the basic rationale behind it. But then again, I have no knowledge of the direct going ons and communications between the contributors and the events that led to this. So there might be a lot I'm just not getting.

The default view appears to be hot, but changing to new does not do much (is there an actual difference between sorting new/x and new/y? Specifying a time frame for new sorting seems kinda pointless).
I think the issue here is probably that I'm subbed to a magazine that has set up a fairly common hashtag (#opensource) for its microblog, so it naturally pulls in a lot.

Hmm, so far that is only showing the microblog posts that are tethered to the magazines I sub, but I also don't really follow many people yet so maybe they have just been drowned out.

and the developers of lemmy added a sneaky thing that would specifically block kbin user agents from being able to federate out to lemmy instances, leading to constant error logs and issues.

Do you happen to know why they did it? Was it that kbin was causing them technical problems somehow and they chose to block it until they are resolved or was it just pettiness?

Hobestly, I can respect that. They seem to be fairly open about the motivations of that decision and who it's targeted it without devolving into vague fluffy corporate speech too much. You can sense the author was a bit pissed by the reactions.
And I do agree that many of the reactions to the news seemed overblown and I think the actions make sense from their point of view without being super shady, even if it still has some negative repercussions for the open source world as well.

"I don't really have anything to hide, but you never know whether the government might act authoritarian at some point. So best to be safe and use privacy tools."

French police: "Hold my tear gas"