It's an arguably poor example in an article by "foobar," not a motivating example from Ethereum's white paper, design documents, a senior researcher, or anything official at all. Ethereum was not designed specifically to allow North Korean transactions.

Reasonably good censorship resistance in general is a design goal shared with pretty much all decentralized blockchains. Without that, complaints about proof-of-stake being oligarchic rule would have a lot more legitimacy.