As Spain, Italy and now France are showing us though, states have no hesitancy to take the whole country offline to block just one piece of unwanted information.

The whole country of France went offline? When did that happen?

It didn't. They are probably referring either to Quad9 being ordered to block resolving certain hosts (and therefore deciding to not offer service in france) or the french prime minister sending a notice to ISPs to prepare DNS blocks for twitter, facebook, etc.

In both cases this is not taking the whole country offline, and for both of them you can easily bypass the "block" by using any other DNS provider. You don't even need VPN/TOR or anything else complicated.

Soon. Because of the protests again the government, the government ordered the ISPs to set up a nationwide block that the government can enable at the flick of a switch. See here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50229861