You're dramatically underestimating the sophistication of these groups. Think about it: these people are risking their freedom by working on this technology in any capacity. They are not naive to the risks of the work nor are they naive to the technical threats facing the software. In fact, the opposite is true. Western VPN companies are very much naive because the risks their users face are much less severe, and at a technical level they don't require anywhere near the same level of sophistication. They're primarily just WireGuard and OpenVPN, which are trivial for censors to block.

Tor is great, and they do great research on censorship circumvention, but it isn't used at any significant scale in these countries.