See my edit—this is certainly possible but I don’t see this approach being successful (yet).

They could also just drone strike the devs, and yet they do not. There is a reason for that, it’s not just that they haven’t thought of it as an option. It’s not a realistic option in the current political environment.

It’s called boiling the frog.

Even Putin took more than a decade before really clamping down on dissent.