I hope we don't live to see China and the USA in a hot war.

I hope we live to see the conditions that make it plausible go away.

I do too, but how would that look like?

I'm not sure how likely it is to when the incumbent empire and the aspiring one are both armed to the tits, neither of which will give up on their claim or their military. Even without confrontation they'll both keep force projecting. I think we just gotta hope there's mutual resistance to any physical escalation, either direct or by proxy, and that the competition remains economical and technological. Turns out even tying the economies to the hip is not an insurance against fighting when those ties turn into weapons in an escalation.

Governments don't have power if the people just drift out of their power. That's one way. Alternatively, one or the other could go the way of Rome (400 and later). I don't think that's likely, but it's possible.

Or, most likely (of the options I've suggested), the next leaders care more about peace than the current ones.

This is a repeat of the same misleading narrative that Putin is trying to push. Ukraine is not "NATO vs Russia", it's "The Ukranians vs Putin".

Similarly, the Taiwan conflict is not "US vs China". It's "the people of Taiwan vs the CCP" (possibly "vs the people of China" though it's hard to say in a country without democracy). There's no question about how the Taiwanese feel; they vote on it every few years in free elections. Americans are mere supporting cast. We have our opinions, but if the Taiwanese all voted to embrace Xi, we'd shake our heads and walk away.

The status quo favors Taiwan. Xi knows this, but without actually going through the process of building a huge navy and launching a military invasion, the de-facto result is that Taiwan continues to be an independent nation. Another couple generations and even China will forget about the big island across the sea. I'm fine with that.

It's rather a repeat of Dalio's idea with regards to the cycle of empires or "world orders", but feel free to read into it what you want, NATO or otherwise. I just meant that I don't see how some form of implicit tension won't exist for as long as there are two competing superpowers flexing military and economic might, and I hope the tension never resolves thru military means.

Recognition from the PRC that Taiwan is an independent nation or the absorption of Taiwan as a province of the PRC.

The stalemate will probably last a long time.