Just looking at a map I don't really see any politically "safe" areas to conduct large-scale training with land/naval/air assets. Go north and you're closer to Korea/Japan, go south and you're closer to the Philippines. All of whom have their own reasons to be nervous about these sort of operations.
It's obviously not a coincidence they are choosing Taiwan now of all times, but I do think the training is ultimately necessary and now is a good a time as any in the military sense. And surely a training environment which is accurate in all geographic/topographical/etc aspects to the real thing—because it's literally the same place—is a bonus. I mean, if you need to conduct major exercises in a politically sensitive area anyways, you might as well do it when you have a convenient political excuse.
I never made any remarks about "safe" areas to conduct large scale joint exercises, and the areas of this exercise around Taiwan is no more or less safe than other areas in the region.
What I am saying is that there is nothing about these exercises at this stage which indicate particular complexity or scale that is outside of what the PLA should be able to usually do, and the only reason this seems to be impressive is because they're choosing to showcase parts of it via media.
Flying a few dozen sorties around Taiwan in close proximity to the island itself is fine, and coordinating with a couple dozen ships doing the same, sure fine.
Far more interesting is actual large scale theater exercises with hundreds of sorties a day in conjunction with rocket forces and naval forces, much of which we would not see being done outside of Chinese airspace or relatively close to Chinese waters, respectively, all with much less media fanfare.
These exercises are comparatively child's play compared to what we know and suspect they do for training.
