I would say that the use of the phrase "we reported" is acknowledging that it is someone else's work. At my University such words have specific meaning.
Even assuming that's true, is it really too much to ask for the student to have a credit? Plenty of papers that build on work by non-academics do that.
The Stanford researchers could have been unaware of the Taiwanese student's work. It would not be surprising given the volume of scientific work that gets published every year. Independent discoveries happen all the time.
Google is your friend.
Literature surveys usually happen during research or before publishing. It's hard to miss something.
I don't know any other way to respond to this than to flat out contradict you: it is easy to miss something, even in a specialized subject where you know the 15 other groups working on similar stuff. Things are hidden in M.Sc. theses, Ph.D. theses and even papers with titles that didn't lead to you to suspect there was something relevant for your specific subject in them. There's just too much being published.