We saw how laws completely failed to make encryption illegal in the 90s as open source encryption code spread rapidly on the internet. "Exporting" encryption software was illegal in many countries like USA and France but it became impossible to enforce those laws. A technical measure defeated the law.
Encryption is just maths. It is the law being unreasonable here, and it will be the law which will ultimately have to concede defeat. UK is the perfect example here - Online Safety Act's anti-E2EE clauses have been basically declared by Ofcom to be impossible to implement and they are not even trying anymore.
Most people obey the law most of the time. Doing a technical end-run around the law (a) leaves you with very few people to talk to (b) makes you stick out like a sore thumb, at which point you're vulnerable to the $5 wrench.
Did you know that porn was quite severely censored in Norway up until the 90's? But suddenly, the censorship stopped. Why? Because of the distributed quality of the internet.
While the Norwegian state may still wish to continue censoring porn in Norway, they deemed the task too difficult and too invasive to continue, so they just dropped it entirely (except of course for certain extreme fringe cases).
I was personally shown clips by the Norwegian Board of Film Classification in the early 2000's showing both grey zone depictions, and clearly illegal depictions of film violence per the law. I am still traumatized from seeing some of that s*t. Legally btw, since they are a state authority tasked to categorize and censor such media, and also educate people with the right degrees. Yet in that meeting, when I asked them how they're handling censorship now, they kind of just threw their hands up in the air and told me directly that "We only give advice on cinema films these days. Look, we can't very well censor the entire internet without also using either extremely invasive or unfair strategies. If you really want some violent or pornographic movie, you're probably gonna get it no matter what we try to do."
So, the morale of this story is, make something ubiquitous enough, or hard enough to censor, and some states might just give up. If you build a truly decentralized system, good luck censoring it. And that was pretty much it for Norway. They had given up on the idea of preventing people from seeing violent or pornographic contents on the internet.
Within political science we speak about effective ways to participate politically. Sometimes that's not screaming slogans outside some government buildings. Sometimes that's simply building resilient and forward secure distributed systems.
Btw. as a side note, the bad guys are still taken. Instead of thought policing entire populations, they're now tending to the guys doing actual harm. The anti encryption bills are just smoke and mirrors to get you to give up essential liberties, so they get more control. It has little or nothing to do with protecting children and you know it.