Thank you for your thoughtful and insightful reply.
Using China as an example, their Great Firewall can block any Steem interfaces/API nodes as they please. So if it ever reach the point where governments need to downvote Steem content as part of their censorship, that means Steem has grown to a level far exceeding the current size.
Actually, China spends a lot of time and money censoring American news programs and movies. The recent story about the NBA getting threatened because someone said "Free Hong Kong" is just the tip of the proverbial ice-berg.
Blizzard corp recently banned a top-ranked-international-player for saying, "Free Hong Kong" in order to appease Chinese censors as well.