Closed source and proprietary. Not really comparable to FLOSS clients for p2p or federated networks.

Element is banned, not Matrix. A more realistic alternative would be a client such as FluffyChat.

Can this talk to other people on Matrix?

As for other alternatives, there's a nice list here: https://matrix.org/clients/

Edit: this seems to be a peer-to-peer alternative chat client. I'm not sure you'll want to use peer-to-peer messengers under a government that issues such bans as the peer-to-peer nature exposes exactly who you talk to and how often. I think the federated model is a lot stronger in preserving privacy (though the Matrix team is running experiments on running peer-to-peer, which would create a very similar model and a similar threat).