The laws as they were had exactly that effect: a lot of companies didn’t intend to have products sold solely in the US. And it was problematic enough that most companies avoided making a US-only version: even carrying such a product on a floppy disk while travelling outside of US could get you in trouble, see this article from 1995:
https://www.wired.com/1995/03/the-continuing-investigation-o...
The companies that did use strong crypto typically had the contracts with the military.
I think both of us might be making the error of correcting something the other person wasn't intending to comment on! :)
Some export complications around crypto exist to this very day-- at least for commercial hardware products. I've had to fill out the export forms myself, and not that many years ago.
However, export was another matter and the export version of the 7800 left the crypto out!
In any case, my point was that weak crypto spanning into the late 90s was not a result of technical limitations.