And yet if you look at the state of the art in surveillance for most governments in the world (buying tools from NSO Group) it seems that many governments have given up on mass surveillance of messages in transit, and instead are focusing their resources on targeted surveillance through device hacking.
So some power has clearly been given up. Not willingly. But still it has.
And in the Snowden leaks you see that even the NSA had problems with tools like Tor and Tails.
Granted that was a decade ago, but there's no reason to believe that work by privacy activists to promote adoption of practices like SSL and START-TLS, or tools like Signal, has not had some impact on the cost and availability of mass surveillance to governments.
I'm not sure where you get your information, but the only reason a government would abandon "in-transit" surveillance is if they have full coverage from another source.
So some power has clearly been given up. Not willingly. But still it has.
And in the Snowden leaks you see that even the NSA had problems with tools like Tor and Tails.
Granted that was a decade ago, but there's no reason to believe that work by privacy activists to promote adoption of practices like SSL and START-TLS, or tools like Signal, has not had some impact on the cost and availability of mass surveillance to governments.