This is a good point. Margaret Roberts argues that the government deliberately does not make censorship impossible to bypass. They only have to add enough “friction” to make people prefer alternatives.
To me, the most striking part of the chapter on friction is the analysis of a survey of urban residents in China done in 2015. The main conclusion of the analysis is that not many people jump the wall, despite the low cost of doing so. The chart below, Figure 5.3 from the book, is sobering. Only 60% of urban respondents had ever used the Internet; of these, only 52% knew there is something called the Great Firewall and that there are ways to circumvent it. Only 5% of those surveyed had jumped the wall, ever. When those who had not were asked why not, their responses indicated they were negatively motivated not by fear, but rather by inconvenience, from not knowing how, or not having a reason to circumvent. Circumvention was correlated with age and education: those that had jumped the wall were more likely to be young, politically aware, and understand English.