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The difference lies in direct exposure and proxies. Ukraine offers a sort of weird middle ground, semi-proxy war of the type we've seen several times throughout the Cold War to varying degrees. Iran, we fundamentally expect to get punched back, directly, not even exclusively through Iran's proxies. Thus a fight over Taiwan, where we expect the punches to land directly face to face is much closer to Iran situationally. Taiwan is currently a latent proxy, but there is really only a few, very implausible scenarios where we'd support Taiwan only by proxy. If China makes a go at it, either we leave them to try to handle it themselves or we get directly in the fight.
In other words: we've seen Ukraine-like situations before a couple times and not much happened most all of those times. We've seen Iran though recently, and to an extent not previously seen (the Soleimani response and then even the 12-day 'war' response were qualitatively different) since Iraq.
There's once big exception to the rule: proxy wars don't usually escalate to direct wars. The Korean War. This actually works in my argument's favor, though, because the US put themselves directly in the fight and it led to direct confrontation.
Picture the following scale:
WW2 was a Type 1 war. These have not happened since WW2 for a reason. The Korean War was a Type 2 war. It's really the only Type 2 war, though Sino-Soviet border clashes might count if you squint, or India-Pakistan if you stretch. A Taiwan-triggered war would probably be closer to a Type 2 war than a type 1 war, but it definitely wouldn't be a Type 3 war. If you count Ukraine as a US proxy, then that was a Type 3 war. To understand what Type 3 wars usually look like, let's look at history, because these are much better understood:
Vietnam: the US thought about flirting with an upgrade (it's worth noting that Type 2 only actually happens if one side strikes and the other side fights back) but decided against it pretty deliberately. Yom Kippur (arguably), the Soviets threatened to put a trigger force into a collapsing Egypt. Both sides went on nuclear alerts but basically both sides pumped the brakes. Soviet-Afghan war, both sides avoided escalation, even though Pakistan was a US ally in the middle of getting their own nukes. The Syrian Civil War was a kind of Type 3.5 war, because air power blurs the lines a bit. No escalation occurred and both parties were pretty careful to avoid an upgrade.
In this context, Ukraine is very much a 'known quantity'. So yeah, even though it seems counterintuitive that a small, direct fight between a power and a small(ish) country is better as a signal than a big, direct fight against a proxy, Ukraine is virtually guaranteed in practical terms to remain a Type 3, while a Taiwan clash jumps from nothing straight to a Type 2 or even Type 1 (if China decided to do a first-strike kind of action, including in space), do not pass go, do not collect $200. This makes Iran a much better signal of how willing the US is to get into a big, direct fight, with direct exposure, because it is a direct conflict, and Iran has a population bigger than the size of Germany, and twice the size of Ukraine! So yes, it's a decent assessment of the risk appetite the US currently has as well as its competence.
The instant jump to a Type 2 war, or more serious, is because Taiwan is an island (and quite close to China), thus after combat begins no pure-proxy assistance is possible. There is no such thing as a protected airlift or sealift out of Taiwan, or meaningful weapon-smuggling into a warzone around it. You either break a blockade with force or you don't. Taiwan is fundamentally incapable of being a Type 3 conflict for this reason.
Where does the American Revolution, wrt Britain and France, fit in this schema?
As of 1776, type 3. By 1778, type 1. The British cope for losing the American War of Independence is that we took a tactical drop in what we wrongly thought was the least important theatre of a four-ocean mostly-naval World War. It was the global war that bankrupted the French monarchy, not the cost of the American intervention specifically.
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I only specifically framed this conversation as describing a post-WW2 paradigm for a reason. WW2 was kind of the final worldwide wake-up call that this is what "total war" does to countries (militarily but also economically), and we've only become more technically capable of that kind of thing since then. Nukes were the nail in the coffin but the culmination of that direction of things. The entire history of war in the world since then has recognized that wars of sufficient global-power scale is so destructive that this energy usually needs to be channeled into smaller, more narrow areas of conflict. Thus, proxy war as a logical "riskiest acceptable" war. This era of relative peace is not an accident. It is rooted in the technological and logistical realities we find ourselves in.
Although in theory a Type 2 war could still take place today, it requires a certain mutual understanding that tends to unravel as war grows more costly, which is a very slippery and quick gradient. It's very noteworthy that the only Type 2 war as I mentioned was before China themselves had nukes! And even then, it was only constrained to more local spheres in part because the US has managed to pull of the whole "oh no it's not OUR war, it's the United Nations' war". Which is almost impossible to replicate. Furthermore, the nature of modern missile and otherwise longer-range warfare means that restricting combat operations to only a specific theater is increasingly only a fiction (and certainly not militarily workable). China being so close to Taiwan only turbocharges this point.
Of course this mostly applies to global powers because they are the only ones capable of such large-scale total war but also because they have, frankly, much more to lose. You can see echoes of these dynamics on lower levels of power but it's strongest at the top tier and nukes are only part of the reason (a big part though).
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I would argue that this classification only came into effect when the lesson of the world wars (and a potential nuclear war) were learned, which is that a war between big powers is a disaster for everyone.
In earlier ages, big powers fought among themselves from time to time, and that could still be the best strategy for the decision makers of the winning side.
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By the end it was a type 2 verging on type 1. You had direct French vs. England naval and land conflict within the 13 colonies, and were starting to see limited naval engagements popping up around the world (the last battle of the American Revolutionary War was off the coast of India, and didn’t involve any Americans). The escalation risk was part of why Britain threw in the towel.
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