But those were very easy to sidestep: proxy/vpn, download java with US encryption, and move on. That is very different with this.

How do you "easy" VPN into the US in 1995? The whole consumer VPN industry didn't exist back then.

Yeah, I was never a consumer. Let's say tunneling/proxies then.

"download java" in 1993 wasn't a thing.

I remember the encryption export mostly from when Java came up; everything had saying that you cannot download specific packages outside the US. We did anyway. Before there were others but Java was biting us the most.