chinese intelligence has already intercepted all sms coming from the app and has all the users phone numbers

You can skip the verification, but it's not obvious how to (dark pattern).

If you skip verification but the people you communicate with do not, then all of you are at risk of being publicly identified.

Or join as a malicious node. There is no panacea without control over some infrastructure.

If they were doing E2E encryption, that would not be a problem. Broadcasting to find the right recipient (the one with the decrypting key) but contents protected from everybody else.

Ok so how would key distribution work here? Tofu?

If you can meet once physically, there is nothing better than that to exchange your public keys. That's why hackers meetings are "public keys signing parties".

For something as low latency as messaging, you can probably use proof of work for DoS resistance

Because messaging software that drains batteries is what everyone wants...

It's better than the alternative, which is no messaging.

PoW or no messaging seems to me like an obviously false dichotomy.