I like medieval stuff but I've nearly learned everything I care about in Europe. I want to get started on China, but I don't have the cultural background to dive in to anything detailed, I'd just get lost in a sea of missing context.
This is exactly what pop historians are for, but 80% of them just make shit up, so I need a recommendation.
It is almost entirely exaggeration. However, with much of the existing known history from that era being fairly mundane annals and otherwise recorded in an un-noteworthy fashion, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms mythos is the leading historical mythos for 'China as a state'. With Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism being more of a set of beliefs and practices rather than a specific liturgical canon (and incredibly varied and distributed at that) alongside other historical folk diety worship, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms is basically the Chinese version of the Bible a.k.a. 'the kinda-sorta history book whose characters and stories everybody constantly references all the time'.
Actual Chinese history and archaeology of the era is quite complex as well, but it's these dramatizations that make up a large bulk of older pop historiography and are good to know for that alone.