Honestly I'm far more interested on Starlink's impact in the developing / unfree world than in access in rural areas in the US. Not that the latter isn't worth fixing, but it's a more gradual shift there rather than a paradigm shift.
I suspect it's just much cheaper to run fiber in those areas where there's not many approaches or right of way issues to deal with
Specifically if you wanted to start a company or even open an office either your business opportunities were limited to local area or you were locked into places with existing fiber connections. This means high paying work was also concentrated in places with existing fiber connections. I am hoping mega constellations will level economic landscape via increased geographic availability of high paying jobs.
The $100 per month doesn't seem like it'd be sufficient to keep ~6000 satellites in orbit either (they're orbiting so low, that they'll need to constantly "boost" themselves to stay in their orbit ring).
So they're losing money per dish, and seemingly losing money per satellite launch, and I have my doubts that even 1-million customers at $100 / month or $1200 / year would be sufficient to keep their infrastructure costs (an ISP with only $1.2 Billion/year costs serving a million customers? Even without satellite launches, satellite development, that seems like a tall order. The ground-based infrastructure costs alone are already going to be costly... its not like bandwidth is free even if you're on the ground)
No one really does that in today's economy. Most businesses these days aren't about achieving profits, but are instead about first achieving dominance... and then hoping you achieve profits afterwards.
That's why we keep seeing companies like "Moviepass" pop up.
Really, star link is a business, they want paying customers-that means complying with local laws.
Besides, censorship is not a uniquely Chinese policy, America seems to be exporting more of it lately.