The clone chips are not better, they could've fixed some bugs in the original chip but they may have their own bugs. While there may be some good clones, there's no way to confirm the chip you got is good. Better to avoid FTDI, real or fake, altogether. For the record, I never used or purchased any FTDI chips since that driver incident, the chip I mentioned was not a FTDI chip.

I needed a USB to serial converter and specifically went out of my way to ensure I did not purchase a FTDI based one exactly because of that malicious driver incident.