I have been working with a few Russian and Belarusian software engineers on Upwork and I now pay them in cryptocurrencies, because Upwork (and other websites) banned their profiles and they can't receive my payments.
It is an answer to the question, and for every sanction you consider valid, there is one you don't, and so the tool to get around them, and the act of getting around them, is not damning.
And I'm saying there is nothing automatically damning about either the tool or it's use or it's use for that purpose.
I guess I have to spell it out: It obviously depends on the sanction, who is declaring it against who, and why, and even on a variety of individual details case by case.
If you would question helping Russia, instead of generally "getting around sanctions", that would be more valid, but really even that is too simplistic.
You don't have to actually have a family member in Russia yourself to imagine that there are probably countless circumstances where you would not criticize someone for getting around any policy.
Or maybe your particular ethics says that you still couldn't even help a family member because ultimately it would come at the cost of some Ukraninian family that you can't justify helping to kill. That would be a defensible stance and I wouldn't call you a bad person for it, but it's not the only valid ethical stance, and you likewise don't have much right to criticise anyone else for deciding that they have their reaons for getting around a sanction.
The short answer to your question was really just "Yes." with no apology or defense needed.
You don't have to spell anything, it's quite clear you mean 'government is an ass, it's rules are not for me, and crypto gives the me the tool I need to ignore them'.
In some cases, you might even be right.
There are doubtless some valid reasons to 'work around' these particular sanctions, but IMHO paying your Russian devs to keep developing your website or whatever, which appears to be the case here, is perhaps not one of them.
Yes, much like the Underground Railroad was a tool used to get around property laws that the government used to enforce turning slaves back into their owners.
Governments have a long history of doing the wrong things, and trying to starve the populations of countries acting against our interests, is one of many examples. If Bitcoin can be used to help feed the innocent, you've actually turned me into a crypto-convert.
Sanctions is a fancy word for "starving the innocent women and children who live in countries not aligned with our interests".
You want to take out Putin, take him out. Don't try to harm innocent people just because they had the misfortune of being born in a country that we no longer find economically useful.
People need to choose their own governments (sometimes force may be required), and not let foreign powers, however seemingly well-meaning, install them, depose them, etc.