Your analysis saying that a one-way outbound link is toxic is an oversimplification and is just plain inaccurate. And the paranoia about reciprocal links being bad for your site is just silly and misses the point entirely.
You should link to websites that you think will benefit your users and will make them consider your site a resource, a good place to go for site recommendations. If you can get them to link back to you, that’s great too, but it shouldn’t be a precondition for linking to them.
People try so hard to look natural that they forget how to be natural. It’s perfectly natural to link to websites you like, and for those websites to link back to you if they like your site. So just do that and quit trying to second guess whether or not a one way link to another site is going to hurt you, because it won’t.