re: Chinese users. I don't know your level of experience with China (I lived there for many years), but I think it very clearly shows the opposite: through a combination of deep packet inspection, a ton of monitoring and intimidating the public, the amount of "wall hopping" that goes on is tremendously small and 95%+ of the population know nothing except what the CCP allows them to. It does not support your case. re: reduced need for cpu/compute: I don't get your idea there, if you are replacing web calls with AI calls you're surely using more compute, not less.
I guess the most useful general comment is: I'm not denying that individual people, at smaller scales, can resist this, with effort. I'm just trying to make a correct prediction about the future of the world generally: I think the overall direction/trend is definitely going one way, not the other way.