But if a government is already crawling up your ass, it won't help much.
E.g, once you're not anonymous, anonymization tools don't help much.
There is active targeted surveillance by a nation state. Tor is not going to help you. No crypto or tech alone will help you, you’ll need to develop extreme opsec practices to stand even a remote chance against a well funded and well equipped adversary focusing on targeting you.
Then there is passive mass surveillance, i.e. the presidential surveillance program, which Tor/VPNs/HTTPS etc will absolutely help with.
I wrote a blog post on tactical privacy a while back that I think is still relevant: https://everytwoyears.org/2020/07/13/tactical-privacy.html
Doxxing/blackmail protection.
If a few people collude to secure moderator positions at different sites and each gains access to IP logs (or someone just bruteforces/exploits the site and dumps logs), anybody can be outed across those sites-- the adversary has effectively compromised the server and can map page accesses directly to your IP.
They don't break HTTPS, they break the weaker link-- the trust of the server owner.
The next step is gaining access to the VPN provider's logs (they don't keep any, right? Right?). They all keep logs. Even if they say they don't, assume they do. Nobody is held accountable for lying about it.
Again, not breaking HTTPS, but breaking the weaker link-- an unscrupulous VPN owner already exploiting the trust of you, the customer.
Tor is the only "safe" way to be anonymous, but even that is dead through fingerprinting, gatekeeping and forced Javascript enabling.
I’m not worried about clowns in white vans or terrorists. If you want protection from the government, you need to advocate for protection under the law. Journalists, NGO workers, etc have to figure out how to manage risk and may need to self-censor to avoid those risks. Tor won’t protect you if you irritate MBS.