You mean to try to block access to it. They wouldn't have succeeded, trust me on that.
Yes, there will, would have been, work-arounds.
TOR didn't exist back then. There were UseNet sites listing opaque proxy URLs, sure...but the salient point I was making was, they didn't even try. Didn't even lay the PR foundation; by getting the nooze mediuh to interview all the poor put-upon people so hurt and ruined by the Free OS Forces of Darkness.
Nope, it slipped right under their radar...which I guess shouldn't surprise me; they're as dense as they're unsubtle. But it does, anyway.