What’s notable is no organization benefited from littering so there is little pushback on the subject, just millions of people behaving slightly differently.
So sure in some states the fines are huge, but New Mexico’s $50 fine is a minimal risk.
After all, the people in and around your car can judge and shame you while you can only get a ticket if there's a cop around.
You are right though, which is why high-status in a society are "allowed" to break social norms with no consequence.
The general consensus in such countries is that the laws are terrible and oppressive, the the brutal enforcement largely ensures compliance.
HN crowd has a definite knack for packing heaps of erroneous thinking (or perhaps deliberate gaslighting) into compact sentences like these.
Deplatforming is a tactic. One specifically designed to exert pressure in a direction not supported by the societal consensus. And yet in nearly every thread about it here, there are highly upvoted comments that pretend deplatforming is a mechanism for enforcing societal consensus.
It is likely that had this propaganda been allowed to run unchecked, there would have been even more people recruited by Daech to go fight in Syria (or get married off), and to attack random civilians in the name of this ideology. Most attacks, if not all, were perpetrated by people who had in large part radicalized online, away from extremist mosques where they might have been more easily detected.
That being said, I don't believe censorship or de-platforming should ever be used outside of preventing the spread of propaganda that results in actual attacks on people. Anything short of this is just talk.