You're the one downplaying here. How many other non-Islamic countries where porn is entirely banned with the websites blocked? Doing deep packet inspection by default? (The difficulty of getting around this isn't very relevant)

Besides authoritarian states and the US, how many where the government can read along in the most popular chat app? Can, say, the Belgium government read along with all messages on Whatsapp?

How many where they also know exactly who is sending that message due to mandatory real identity verification? Even if the Belgian government can't read the Whatsapp message content that Belgians send, do they by definition have the person's identity directly linked to the message?

No to all of the above. South Korea is an extreme outlier and this has been the status quo for years. Your focus on the "meme of the president", despite there being little evidence that this is the target, gives away that you're pushing an untrue narrative here. The GP has painted an accurate picture: all the things I mentioned above have been around for more than a decade across both blue and red governments, neither of them meaningfully opposing it.