I often see that many Indian people can still access sites that are prohibited by their government because several of my acquaintances have never had problems with them accessing sites that their government has prohibited, not only cryptocurrencies, maybe even gambling sites, but again it depends on how the user uses their wits to To access this gambling site, you don't have to use a VPN as a quick step, look for other ways that are safer than using a VPN which might lead us to have problems with gambling sites if we use it.
Exactly. India has the highest population in the world currently which is why it's extremely difficult for the Indian government to monitor every single citizen properly despite whatever big statements they make.
For example, they effectively banned many popular crypto exchanges recently, but their citizens are still easily able to use those sites with/without a VPN.
If the government of India really banned crypto exchanges and the citizens can still access those exchange websites without the use of VPN, it simply means that the ban has not or was not properly effected, since after a ban, the government usually have to work with internet network providers to make sure they block every citizen access to which ever site they have declared as banned, if this is not done, then it means that the government only declared the site banned, but did not take the step or measures to effectively implementing or effecting the supposed ban.
When the Nigerian government banned twitter like I've said before, all the citizens of the country lost access to Twitter, the only way to then access Twitter was by the use of VPN, and remember, Nigeria is the most populous country in the whole of Africa..
So, effecting a ban has close to nothing to do with how populous a country is, but has everything to do how serious the government are with such ban.