If operating a (even encrypted) wireless mesh net gets you gulag or death penalty, not very far.

In theory, there is no reason it can't scale indefinitely using something similar to IP. It's already a self-building network. The hard part is how you incentivise transit nodes. Currently that's what ISPs and backbones provide. They are incentivised to interconnect because that's their core business model. So a truly decentralized Internet requires a decentralized incentive system.

This would enable circumvention, but it's also pretty easy to triangulate radio signals, so it's fairly easy for a belligerent organization to track that someone is sending something.