I'm no security expert but I'm nearly certain that is defeated by using a VPN or tor or some other way of obfuscating your traffic.

Sure, but this all starts to become far too complex for the average citizen. The average citizen that just about managed to wrap their brain around crypto in a semi-OK UX is going to get caught out.

I know ex-military folks that can survive in the wilderness just fine, but your average person wouldn't, and this is about the 99%, not the 1%.

What next? The phones available in the country have a specific ROM that doesn't offer VPNs? Already happening. Not even accounting for leaks in VPNs, and whether someone can trust a VPN provider. We already know that the major providers sell netflow data.

The average citizen doesn't know wilderness survival because they don't need it to survive and thrive. Throw a dumb 18 year old into the army and they will probably learn it just fine.

Learning to read takes way more time and energy than learning to use crypto behind a VPN, but we do it in part because it makes us successful. Basically every child learns this complex task. It actually turns out that just spending time to practice a procedural task is a perfect substitute for intelligence, for many many tasks. I think obfuscating traffic is one of those where maybe some people will take a lot longer than others but almost everyone could learn. If VPN or tor becomes a critical component to someones livelihood they will learn to do it or someone will profit from dumbing it down enough that they're able to.