GFW is only implemented in the mainland China, not Hong Kong.

    China == (mainland + (Hongkong SAR + Macau SAR) + (... possibly other de jure claims))

To use Airdrop the main advantage is it can be used to spam everyone nearby.

If it can be used by protestors it also can be used by advertisers.

They are not using AirDrop to bypass the GFW for themselves, they are using it to spread information to citizens that are otherwise normally subject to GFW and therefore only have government-approved or government-generated information available to them.

Mainland news put HK protesters as violent, rebellious youngsters that are causing trouble and injury to everyone else by having greedy demands of something better than what mainland has. Such story leads to minimal sympathy and curiosity.

Even knowing that this information is filtered, few will end up truly questioning it, and thus even when they leave GFW, they will not know that there is conflicting information to find.

That’s a very loose definition of the word “evade” and the headline is definitely misleading. The average person was probably expecting to find some sort of censorship evasion while current being censored.

Censorship evasion is doable within minutes for most, which is well known for those interested in it.

However, many do not feel compelled to evade it, and have no idea of what happens "on the outside".

Censorship evasion is no longer trivial. Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) exists and makes it difficult to use even VPNs. Shadowsocks works but has limited UDP support out of the box iirc.

There are massive regional variations, so what I say is likely not universal, but my non-techie acquaintances still successfully use VPNs, in their case to use services like Facebook and WhatsApp.

I do not know what provider they use, but their knowledge of VPNs go no further than knowing that "VPN = facebook access", so it would seem that "commoners" still manage at least in some bigger regions.

And in UK it’s used to send dickpics to strangers on the train... opendrop requires to set security level to everybody instead of contacts. If you forget to switch back to default you get instant reminder once you get onto public transport.