The U.S. isn't Draconian, it's actually very permissive.
We all know that in Europe people have gotten sued and even lost their cases and had to pay damages, even for saying the truth.
Apparently hurt feelings in many jurisdictions are fair game to go after someone.
Bitcointalk enjoys freedom in that it's a forum where you can say anything about anyone, and just lay it out to the court of public opinion without fear of it being taken down.
There exist VERY few public forums that allow completely free and uninterrupted discussion of people and ideas.

And besides, it's not just the website location that matters. The whole value that bitcointalk can provide is based on the fact that there's active staff maintaining it.
And it's their jurisdiction that matters most. Like, we can't expect anyone to migrate to Russia for simply running a forum. That's not realistic. And it's also unlikely that this would allow more freedom of speech.

So if governments today consider that mixers are helping facilitate illegal and harmful transactions, why should our moderators be caught in the crossfire?
We did notice from a past mixer thread that was shut down for instance, that user assets were frozen on Binance for simply having been paid through a signature campaign... And this is just a small example. There's no need for forum members to come under such serious regulatory scrutiny with sanctions. Because it was obvious that large part of this forum's userbase was actually receiving payments from mixers. And even if users are willing to take that risk, I'm pretty sure nobody in the west can risk hosting a forum where large parts of its userbase are under sanctions.

In the long term I'm pretty sure keeping the forum alive, its administrators and staff out of jail is more important than going to ridiculous lengths over any ideal. We don't have the strength in numbers or means to fight governments as of right now. Buuuut... One must also consider that governments are actually one step behind, not ahead. What we do have, is the technological advantage.

Mixers could only be shut down because they're fully centralized and trust based. But there already exist trustless and decentralized ways to mix coins. The use of which will likely increase a lot, and with use, also comes increased interest to fund and improve these technologies.