I definitely believe Taiwan would rather burn it than see it in the hands of their greatest adversary. Rigged to blow seems silly but I expect they would bomb it to dust.

Bombing is not necessary. Ceasing supplies will turn it into dust in a moment of time, irreversibly. Consider Samsung factories in Texas that are still stalling, caused by quite short electric power outage.

Well, some public here tend to think about TSMC as something solid and uniform, one can possess and/or takeover. Heck, no! TSMC is a complex organism consisting of thousands of talented engineers and scientists, top-notch equipment that require servicing, thousands of suppliers, software and IP modules bound by licensing and servicing agreements with hundreds of western companies. A faint hint of military action around Taiwan will ruin TSMC in a second, which by the way will have far far extending chain of events effecting the global high-tech industry. And I bet it's going to be far worse than covid-19 pandemic we are currently facing. The world we built is way too fragile. We must negotiate, not to fight, if we want to get going.

This rumor could have been propagated by Taiwan itself, The economic fallout from the loss of TSMC for the aggressor is high enough that this could indeed be a credible deterrent.

Coincidently, I was independently wondering about this too.

The same measure is taken for other valuable targets. For example, many major bridges in the US are rigged to self-destruct in the event of capture during land invasion. You won't find much information about this online. All I can say is, there's a reason why many jobs at the US DOT require a security clearance. If you want to read up on another real world example of this, here's an article about how Switzerland implemented this: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/designed-for-demoliti...

There is an interesting theory by Dimitry Khalezov concerning 9/11. He states that this was also done for the NYC World Trade Center and the Chicago Sears Tower. He claims the event occured because a bad actor gained control of this demolition system for the WTC, and that the planes were part of a cover story. It's an interesting explanation. Check it out if you're interested: https://youtu.be/IU7KRHOdnuo