My bet would be that invasion wouldn't look like quick war, but slow control of political power either through light force like economic blackmail, or through something similar to what US did with Venezuela.
Now that US has already opened the gate to labelling nation head as drug seller, this just eases things for China.
just a gut feeling, but if they had to for some reason, I feel like they'd just go in and bomb as much strategic assets and invade, because in their eyes aside from Taiwan, there isn't much left to "unify" and it'd be historic, not something they'd need to do every decade or even century
I feel like Russia thought the same of Ukraine, even though it is way bigger
Any country that competently adopts Ukrainian drone technology cannot effectively be invaded currently. And that's for a continental invasion.
Taiwan? All surface ships are sitting ducks. Troop transport ships would get absolutely decimated, and then the landing troops would get swarmed by drones all over again, and then they have to maintain logistics to the small minority that land (good luck with that). And that's without naval drones.
With naval drones? I have no idea how China gets anything across the strait.
And all the above is true for a competently organized Chinese invasion. Which it won't be.
Also the US has very publicly shown they don’t have the ability to effectively wage war over any period of time.