You never used dialup did you?

zmodem to the rescue!

300 baud. Was enough to download grainy porn pics. With a proper download tool that continues after hangups etc you can just leave it on for a week and I have when downloading software end 70s. No problem. Also via the airwaves: we had software via the radio every sunday. Works fine. Modern software is shitty large: it would be nice if a VPN provider would just release the driver and a cli which should not weigh over a mega (far less but outside mr Whitney i am not sure if that type of software dev still exists) for this type of transfer.

9600 bps dialup using the protocols commonly used back then such as ZMODEM could do file transfers at 3 MB/hour. That would be fine for grabbing VPN software.

Wireguard ships with the Linux kernel so you only need to receive ~60 bytes of configuration information.

The user-facing software is not included in the kernel, but you need that to configure wireguard.

Is that true? I thought wg-quick etc were just convenience functions and that it's relatively trivial to use iproute2 to configure a VPN link

You don't need wg-quick. You do need the "wg" command.

Wireguard is also easily censored and is already censored in the places that censor VPNs.

HF are really noisy. You need a lot of error correction to ensure that the package is consistent and without any error. This will drastically decrease the real bit rate.