[jerzyt]

You can ask the question at little differently. The authoritarian state may not care about most sites, but they do care about a few selected sites which they consider "subversive." By monitoring the traffic at both ends, they could potentially correlate packet timestamps, and infer your IP without directly tracing it. Kind of like Shazam for dictators.

[bawolff]

Typically most people would not use a vpn where both ends are in the same authortarian country.

Which there may still be other side channels, and other things, but the naive version of that attack sounds a little unlikely.