The ironic thing is that if the US government wanted people to stop using it because of the PRC, they should have just leaked some fake Snowden style documents saying that the NSA was using it. Everyone would drop it like a hot potato then.
I can tell you they aren’t just banning IPs for abuse. I have run an OpenVPN server on Linode for years. I am the only one using that IP and it was blocked at some point. They are most likely blocking all known VPS IP blocks. OpenAI does the same thing with Cloudflare for ChatGPT.
ATAK-Civ originally developed by the U.S. Military for tactical use on Android phones. It was open-sourced and released on the Play Store several years ago.