F-35s aren't particularly useful for collecting taxes, for maintaining a state. You can't use them to intimidate an individual, it's a huge waste of resources for the owner of the F-35. What's more dangerous than an F-35 is a group of guys with guns driving around in a pickup truck. Guns and trucks are just so much cheaper than fighter jets, so much more deployable... not to mention the entire logistical and manpower apparatus that goes into getting an F-35 in the air. If you want to win a war of attrition you use cheap, effective tools, not the flashy stuff. Flashy weapons are great for blowing up some other country's infrastructure, it's not very useful if the enemy is your own people. If you blow up all your own people and infrastructure, what do you have power over?

If you and everyone in a 10-mile radius of where you're sitting right now decided to ignore some federal law, like maybe the one against cannabis, what the heck is an F-35 going to do about it? Blow up a building, is that supposed to help? No, you get some guys with guns and trucks and then you can start going door to door, threatening people, looking around, collecting stuff, whatever. You can set up checkpoints and block off bridges, the whole shebang, because you're trying to establish control, not just blow things up.

Blowing things up has its uses but if you want to intimidate someone to the point where you have power over them, you need to be a little more intimate. You can't just be a fleck in the sky and you can't just show up do to the big stuff. You need to be in their face as a persistent, immediate threat. That's what influences human behavior and that's how power is established. That's exactly why small guns are such a sticking point in the USA, they're a very effective counter to this intimate threat.