And people living in oppressive regimes have access to free network infrastructure? That's news to me.

An oppressive regime will just make crypto illegal if they want to, make even possessing cryptographic keys punishable, etc. And crypto transactions make it easier to trace spending to you anyway, especially when the regime can unabashedly MITM any traffic within or into/out of their country, etc...

There are semi-competent oppressive regimes, like china, and incompetent ones, like many in south america. Still useful on a spectrum, and significantly more useful with low-tech or poor oppressive regimes.

Also large orgs run on percentages, economics and so on. Anything that makes it more expensive to be oppressive or change the balance of things is useful. It doesn't have to be a %100 solution to be helpful.