Are you making the argument here that there is a free software alternative to ICEblock that is suitable for novice technology users - the wider public - and offered the same guarantees of anonymity that Apple’s notification system offered ?
You are not entitled to the first class pre-made internet infrastructure that the tyrants lured you in with and that you've taken for granted.
You are entitled to understand how the world really works, opt out of the broken, corrupt, existing systems, and opt into ones you can meaningfully control, but nobody's going to do the hard work for you, and you are not inherently entitled to the fruits of that hard work, either.
Literally all of recorded human knowledge is available to pretty much everyone in the US at zero marginal cost 24/7, and it's never been easier to access all of it than it is right now.
The honest excuse agaisnt this isn't "that's too hard" or "that's not realistic", it's "I'm too lazy".
It's not turnkey for novices, true, but if you see that as a problem, if you see turnkey solutions for the technically illiterate as the starting point you're entitled to and refuse alternatives for lacking, then you're really just reinforcing my point about revealed preferences for a slide into totalitarian fascism over stated preferences to not slide into totalitarian fascism.
Rejecting this because it's not turnkey is like declaring through action "I prefer sliding into fascist totalitarianism, because the alternative requires more effort than I care to put in to avoid fascism. The convenience and comfort of not having to learn anything is more important to me than the human rights of the marginalized and vulnerable."
Believing that the solution to ICEblock being banned by Apple is for the affected proletariat to rise up and run their own software and government-proof cryptography systems is fanciful, to put it mildly.
Most of the public don’t even know this is possible, let alone where to start with it, and even if they did you’re judging other people’s technical abilities as on-par with your own.
The solution I’m hoping for here is for Apple, a gigantic company with a reasonable track record in defending privacy and fending off government overreach, to stand up to the crooked old bully and stop giving him their lunch money.
This is the most tone deaf answer I've read in quite a while. Learning to code, and everything you listed isn't available or possible by most people in a timely manner.
The question was what can be done now, by novice people. Not by people who must first acquire years of tech knowledge.
It's not reinforcing your point to say that. Not everyone can do it. And it shouldn't preclude them from being safe.
This is equivalent to pointing at some ivory tower of safety and say: "git gud."