I’ve seen this kind of attitude before in Taiwan many times over the years. I can’t help but feel that it comes from a place a bitterness due to being forced to

I’ve seen this kind of attitude before in Taiwan many times over the years. I can’t help but feel that it comes from a place a bitterness due to being forced to learn English at a young age. I would agree with you in full in certain edge cases (such as Vladimir Nabokov’s mastery of English which absolutely eclipses 99.9999% of native English speakers) but to suggest that most are better is a bit rich. Average native speakers may be unaware of named grammatical concepts, such as tag questions or contrary to fact conditional statements, but they certainly understand how to use them. Where you begin to see the gulf between native speakers and ESL people is in their swiftness in things like satire, asking questions which nudge conversation, effortlessly using articles correctly, communicating abstraction, making long sentences with numerous prepositional phrases which all use the right preposition. There are many tells. A great number of people absolutely reach the level of being truly bilingual and integrated into the culture but it’s uncommon at least to become better than most native speakers.