That's why we have technologies like Tor which will happily find a number of hops that do allow you to establish that connection.

Also IP-level blocks will never be perfect. See Hong Kong proxies. Or people in traded IP ranges classified as coming from another country.

Yes, the Internet as currently structured is resistant to this. The Internet is not guaranteed to continue to have that structure. I'm saying that if our choices are "constant attacks such that the Internet is horribly dangerous" and "don't have the Internet", the popular (at the state level) solution will be "I choose neither—instead, we're changing the Internet".

It's not direct packets. You ssh into a box in, say, UAE, then Cuba, then Canada, then USA. You're just uploading and running scripts, so latency doesn't matter.

Yes, I know how the Internet works now. It doesn't have to keep working that way, and if attacks get really bad the result will not be that we just live with them. The Internet will be modified to reduce the threat to a tolerable level. There's already been some pretty serious work put into what this will look like, if/when it happens.

So all that will change is you use a wireless link (starlink?) to SSH into a box in another country that connects to a box to a box to a box. It will not change a lot, infact as starlink like satellites become common place you can use them as jump boxes....

Your random Iranian hacker might not, but states will find ways around it. Even smaller criminal organizations find ways around such limitations.

Security does not have to be perfect to be effective. If it did, we'd have no security, because none of it is both useful /practical and perfectly effective.