"It really feels like the established centralized services are doing us a favor by shooting themselves in the foot as they crackdown on everyone across the board. What are they thinking?"
I find it useful to consider the worst case scenario, add impossible layers of foreknowledge, multigenerational planning, and skillful psychological manipulation of ordinary people. Given seemingly unrelated factors like the War on Cash, market manipulation (apparent in BTC charts), the developing panopticon, and even things like black market organ harvesting, war profiteering in general, and the burgeoning Prison Industrial Complex, it's possible to glimpse business reasons to crash extant Gorilla Kings in the media markets.
Driving content creators to DLT based social media and publicly auditable tokenized money enables the Masters of the Universe to drive a stake in the heart of black markets. This enables them to touch every transaction and extract rent. Centralized walled gardens of wealth and power depend on parasitism. Prior to the information revolution, cash and similar money enabled both parasitism via governmental and corporate profiteering vectors, but also via black markets that insulated them from public outrage. Today too much information is available that can link public figures whose power depends on propaganda and deceit to crimes against humanity. Think Laura Silsby and Haiti, and how the internet makes it possible to directly link the Clintons to human trafficking. Consider Bosnia and Dyncorp during the Clinton administration. Think White Helmets in Syria today.
By forcing people to use DLTs for all financial operations, black markets formerly accessible to clever ordinary civilians (transactions that criminal syndicates most profiting from them, and government corruption were unable to parasitize) become impossible to that demographic, except for crude barter. This greatly increases the parasitic profit potential of governmental vectors, while using national secrecy mechanisms still shields powers behind thrones from being revealed as players in black markets for drugs, slaves, and organs, leaving them even more dominant over global finance in every way.
On it's face censorship is proof of weakness. Used as a goad to drive cattle to platforms preferable to powerful profiteers parasitizing public provenance, it's a secret weapon that cryptically supports the broader agenda behind the panoptic police state vector for corruption and graft. Further support for this theory is the declining profitability of the enemedia - something the business wizards clearly aren't being blindsided by yet continue to exacerbate.
The more cynically observable political phenomena are considered, the more they make sense.