The problem with Taiwan is that to take Taiwan, they have to actually take Taiwan. That means transporting troops across the straits in sufficient force to establish a beachhead and transporting supplies and reinforcements to that beachhead. That requires a lot of Chinese surface shipping that would be even more vulnerable to cruise missiles and air attack. And that’s assuming an RoE where the US doesn’t just immediately (conventionally) bomb all of China’s coastal ports preemptively. Even if they solve that problem, it would be logistically very difficult to cross even the Taiwan Straits in sufficient force, and would require destroying and alienating Taiwan and causing a possibly bigger problem in the long run.

This is why the South China Sea is so important—it provides a potential outlet to the open sea while keeping open the possibility of gradual, peaceful reintegration with Taiwan.

The only caveat—and it’s a big one—is that China is in a demographic situation where it wouldn’t hurt them to lose even ten million men due to the heavy gender imbalance of the military-age generation created by the one-child policy.

As for DEWs, cruise missiles and saturation attacks work because you can launch so many cruise missiles that no system can track all of them in enough detail to acquire a firing solution and launch SAMs. DEWs simplify this a lot. The firing solution is just line-of-sight to a contact, you can fire the DEW as quickly as you can generate power rather than having a set amount of ammunition you need to conserve, and if it’s a choice between firing at an unconfirmed target and losing the ship and you can fire the laser, you fire the laser. The question is simply generating enough power to fire the DEW at the necessary rate to handle a saturation attack. Hypersonic cruise missiles make this harder, but at the cost of the cruise missiles themselves being more expensive. It’s not obvious where the balance is going to end up.