I don’t like the decision either, but the point you make (tech-savvy people can bypass it) doesn’t acknowledge the fact that you don’t need to block 100% of users to have an effective measure. Most people don’t know how to use a vpn, or even that it exists.
Additionally, VPNs aren’t the panacea many paint them to be, and I seriously wish that stopped. There’s nothing stopping a VPN provider from sharing your data, and governments can ban VPNs. The true defence is encoding rights in laws, not circumvention.
You can even build a Great Firewall. You can ban encryption, and mandate that the house walls must be made transparent to ensure no criminal activities could hide within.
The question is whether the societal cost of that is worth the societal benefits.
I would add as an indirect reply to the poster you’re replying to, that most people know about VPNs because of exactly the point you make. Loads of VPN businesses are out there and they’re advertising in the mainstream about how they protect you from hackers, your ISP, ambiguous WiFi shenanigans, etc. Those businesses have made VPNs fairly common and point-and-click easy to use. Even where they use the same protocols (IPsec, OpenVPN, WireGuard, et al) that you’d use as a technical person, they’ve wrapped them in mom-and-pop GUIs to make them accessible to the masses.
