Devil's advocate response: If these content blockers are just 'futile games of whack-a-mole', then why are you getting up-in-arms about their existence? Should be easy to avoid them if you truly believe what you say.
Stuff like what the UK is trying to do with a DNS based "black list" of bad things on the internet? Futile game of whack a mole.
Authoritarian regime that forces all ISPs in a country to run networks funnelling all traffic through a government run central point where they do DPI and flow analysis on it (Chinese GFW for instance)? More of a real threat.
For instance there is one ASN in Iran that has transit connections to the outside world. All ISPs are forced to be downstream of it. https://bgp.he.net/AS12880
Well, yes, the original article is about funneling traffic through a centralised DPI content blocker, and not a trivial DNS blacklist.
Agreed, the UK's DNS filtering is definitely a simple to defeat by anybody whack-a-mole (e.g. thepiratebay.org is blocked? Oh no! Let's just google for Pirate Bay and pick one of the many, many unblocked mirrors)
But the kind of DPI, forced blocking utilised by these middleboxes is certainly a step above that, to the point that most people will not be (say) using measures like a VPN to bypass the block.
There are easily measures that will cause the closure of your small business if used against you personally that would not stop A drug dealer let alone all drug dealing.
Because whacking even 5% of moles looking for ways around government[0] censorship is a unconscionable travesty.
0: eg, China, Iran, etc; if you don't think people getting caught is a problem then I question your basic human decency; if you don't think 5% of people getting caught is a problem then I question your sense of scale and/or ability to multiply numbers by other numbers.
Authoritarian regime that forces all ISPs in a country to run networks funnelling all traffic through a government run central point where they do DPI and flow analysis on it (Chinese GFW for instance)? More of a real threat.
For instance there is one ASN in Iran that has transit connections to the outside world. All ISPs are forced to be downstream of it. https://bgp.he.net/AS12880