Also for VPN providers, and their customers. And generally for people who want to buy stuff and lease online services ~anonymously. If one mixes well enough, that is.
Most mixers use CoinJoin, which gives you trustless assurances that you won't lose your money. The worst thing you'll lose is your time.
There is the concern that you'll end up with Bitcoin that's been tainted in one way or another. However, at least some mixing services get coin from miners, so it's clean. And you can check for that in the blockchain.
That's mostly a concern when you're mixing Bitcoin before converting it to meatspace fiat. If you're anonymizing Bitcoin purchased with meatspace fiat, it doesn't matter so much if some is tainted. Or at least, it won't unless tainted coin gets blacklisted.
Just a thought
But no matter how you get the Bitcoin, you can get whatever degree of anonymity you want, by mixing it many times. You mix via Tor and nested VPN chains, with a different Whonix VM and mixing service for each mix.
From there, send your coins through a samouari whirlpool https://samouraiwallet.com/whirlpool
Then send them wherever you like.
There is still some counterparty risk (what if you're buying coins from the CIA, or whatever), but it's almost minimal.
Buying coins from a Bitcoin ATM is even easier, if there's one near you.
Enjoy those massive fees!
Frankly the failure of "original" Bitcoin to adapt to use as a currency seems to me to be a total failure of vision.
First, the market seems to strongly disagree with you [1]
Second, what seems to me a total failure of vision is trying to shoehorn something as new and disruptive as Bitcoin in the old and worn out yoke of currencies as they used to exist. There's paypal for that.
[1] https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/BCHBTC/?exchange=COINBAS... (choose the 5 yr. view)
It's an entirely new beast in the financial instrument space.
It does bear some characteristics of traditional currencies, but not all of them.
Specifically, as it works today, and until Lightning gets some traction, BTC isn't very convenient for small day to day transactions like buying a cup of coffee.
On the flipside, it does have attributes that traditional currencies strictly do not have.
For cases such as the OP, there is no other financial instrument on the planet that will cut it (other than things like Monero / ZCash / MimbleWimble).
Besides being antifragile and censorship resistant, there is also a very strong case to be made for Bitcoin in the 'preservation of wealth' niche (if you are strongly insensitive to short-term volatility, and capable of playing on a 5 year time horizon, that is).
[EDIT]: To answer your question more precisely, Bitcoin has most definitely been a success story for sites like sci-hub, Wikileak and generally speaking, people who try to speak truth to power.