This has obviously been proven false with the Great Firewall of China, and of Russia’s latest attempts of completely disconnecting from the global internet.

Not it hasn’t. Pretty much the only country which manages it is NK, and that’s because they have 100% control of their citizens.

With TOR and mesh networking, some sort of a system will remain no matters who tries what. The level or communication that was extremely centralised and possibly censored were things before the 80’s. After that, you could just host your own site online and “hide the ip” (not really tho but hosting your things in another country was sort of an equivalent). So information starred glowing much mire freely.

And becsuse all these techs exist, communication will ever regress to such a state that it was in.

So an exaggeration, sort of. Depending on how you define “internet”.