I don't think it's helpful to consider this ban a non-issue because it's
easy to bypass. It's easy to bypass this time, next time it may be a
bit harder, depending on what the government orders ISP's. And there probably will be "next time", depending on the effects of all this.
Also, someone else here asked about legality of bypassing the ban,
that is a good question I'd like to see answered, even though I think we all know the answer to that one.
This slippery slope is exactly what happened in China.
- First, they block a few websites: no big deal, I'll just use a VPN.
- Then they block OpenVPN default port: no big deal, I'll just use another port or IPSec.
- Then international connections slow down to a crawl: no big deal, maybe they're not throttling but just having capacity issues, let's wait a bit see if it gets better.
Then one day your realize that what was at first a minor inconvenience is now wasting hours of your life and killing your productivity.
So all of a sudden work being outsourced to India needs to go through a VPN located somewhere else in the world. Whoever is doing the work will need to jump through at least a couple of hoops to set that up and keep working through it. Additional costs will be introduced. It's not a show-stopper, but it seems as though it could easily have a material impact.
It's less easy to put workarounds in place for, say, a configuration-managed CI system pulling from github than for your own dev workstation. In theory it's simple, but in practice there's a lot of boilerplate and testing.
Also, someone else here asked about legality of bypassing the ban, that is a good question I'd like to see answered, even though I think we all know the answer to that one.