This is a tiring example of why the web and all its technologies thoroughly suck. It's a boiling toilet fueled by greed.
I like the approach taken by the folks at the dat project and beaker browser. Let's make the web a DHT already. If we can force consumers to share what they consume then a DDOS becomes impractical for censoring speech (the speech spreads all over the network, making it counterproductive).
Popular native apps could execute the same exact attack, except this time you wouldn't be able to simply open a browser's developer console to debug it.