Remembering to look for and ignore folks with that telltale indicator has made the fediverse so much more enjoyable.
Is this "taking Chinese propaganda at face value"?
Well... no, not exactly.
Your approach to helping to see truth through the miasma of the narrative is, as you present it, reasonable if unavoidably inherently biased - independent journalists are largely going to be presenting the western Ukranian perspective, just by dint of volume (nobody puts them in prison just for being critical of the Ukrainan commanders (the nuances of that are a different discussion that is also important).
Side note about russian independent journalists
I can name many independent russian journalists, but that's because their names stand out; there just aren't that many allowed to exist, and their jobs are incredibly dangerous and memorable. Many of them are unironic proletariarian heroes. (Favorskaya and Kreiger, both of Sotavision, are the two that spring most readily to mind, both having been recently sentenced). They stick in the memory because of their rarity and how messy their fates tend to be.
(I am also (and I want to be clear not in a dismissive way I am just genuinely unclear what you are referring to) very curious as to what you mean by material evidence - things like photographs or 1st party accounts?)
I have done a similar thing, where I have based my opinion on careful research of my own interactions with Ukranians and the work of academics familiar with the situation as well as:
- the documentation from both state and independent news reporting groups inside Ukraine (and to the extent we have them Russia
- the patterns of behavior Russia has historically used to justify their imperialism that are reflected in their current actions
- the truly overwhelming number of reports and analyses from long-established dedicated & well respected international groups who report on this
And that's I suspect what you have done too.
But... when I do the same thing for the claims of genocide in China, I arrive at the conclusion it's very much occurring. There's overwhelming documentation from many many sources on the topic, and much as with the Ukranian conflict, the majority are going to be western aligned simply because (despite the fascist push for control of western media) independent and critical media is not suppressed in the west, but it very much is in china (to any comparable degree) (the list of independent Chinese journalists is longer than in Russia, which tracks it's a much larger country, but their lives are often no less fraught). In different ways than in Russia, but nontheless the narrative is extremely strictly controlled.
Why then do you treat the mountain of inherently biased evidence for Russia being wrong as acceptable and reasonable, but when many of the same organizations you will have used to dismiss Russia's claims say there is a genocide in china, they are dismissable?
Setting aside that a genocide does not have to look like whats happening in palestine (ask me about native american genocides I can go on for a while), it's internally inconsistent reasoning.