Can you point me to more info on that or just tell me? I am curious about reasons to be more optimistic than that book lays out. I would much prefer the Carl Sagan view of the Cosmos as one where it simply makes no physical nor cultural sense at all to be aggressive toward other stellar civilizations.

What flaws? Do they apply to variants such as Greg Bear's and related ideas such as berserkers?

There are loads of issues with it as hard sci-fi, but the bigger issue is that it's meant as a political allegory far more than it's meant to be hard sci-fi. Where I think it shines to some extent in the latter case is its ability to explore scale and build intuition about the vast scales involved in space.

Otherwise though? Sophons destroy the entire premise of the "Dark Forest"! Still as I said the series is far more concerned with overt allegories (West vs East, Collectivism vs Individualism, etc), and more covert allegories that allegedly criticize the CCP's way of doing things.

I don't read Mandarin, but I suspect the ability to do so and the high context nature of the language, helps a lot in getting that across.

Why would physicists have anything useful to say about this theory?