In my area there are now just enough Meshtastic nodes that I can (somewhat unreliably) talk between my office and home, about 5 miles.

However, it does heavily relay on the internet for setup and distribution (app stores, or else lots of pip install, git clone, pnpm install, etc.)

I've been working on a virtual machine with all the dependencies preinstalled just so I'll have offline access, and it's surprisingly difficult (though I'm not super familiar with typical webdev stuff). I'd have to think a regular user who really needs to rely on it doesn't stand a chance, which doesn't seem to mesh(ha) that well given how loudly the "off gridness" of it is touted.

Then again, you probably need the internet to be able to obtain the hardware in the first place, but that's another problem.