I guess that they don´t really care about the few people, who bypass the bans by using a VPN.
90 % of people won´t bother with a VPN or are not tech-savvy enough to use one and therefore
the ban is actually working as intended for the majority of people. There will always be a few people
that are either criminal or creative enough to circumvent any kind of ban.
i wouldn't say they don't care. after all, VPN users were the minority before the ban, so of course they're still the minority after. that doesn't really say whether the ban is working. i'm reading that most of the VPNs available in China before the ban are still available now, so they must not be enforcing it heavily. from an end user perspective, that's not much deterrent.
a survey earlier this year showed 14% of chinese internet users were using a VPN
daily, or ~100 million users per day. i wonder what overall VPN usage looks like if that's just daily users. seems significant to me.