Hi, posting from my main account (I'm also the poster of the GP comment).

"Nothing special" in this case was meant to describe the fact that it's random data with no identifiable patterns inherent to the data; you're absolutely right that that's what obfs4 does. I understand the confusion though, this phrasing could be better.

    > your government can decide to block unknown protocols

This does happen, though when I worked in the industry it wasn't common. Blocking of specific protocols was much more of an obstacle.

    > you should trick DPI into thinking it sees HTTPS. Unless your government decides to block HTTPS

HTTPS blocking (typically based on either the presence of a specific SNI field value, or based on the use of the ESNI/ECH TLS extension) was prolific. I won't comment on whether this was effective or not in impeding efforts to get people in these places connected.

I will say though, Operator's Replicant does something similar to what you're describing in that it can mimic unrelated protocols. It's a clever approach, unfortunately it was a bit immature when I was working in that area so the team didn't adopt it while I was around.