Why block outbound SSH connections? Inbound I understand. And given how easy it is to tunnel over HTTPS this seems to be targeted an accidental or unsophisticated clients - neither of which seems to be a likely descriptor of an SSH connection.
I remember in the past how I lost couple of hours trying to understand why I can't reach a remote instance via RDP, only to finally figure it was the port blocking on the office firewall.
I spent quite a while trying to convince the local sysadmin that this doesn't make any sense. His only explanation was "security" without any actual explanation of what is he securing us from.
It is a pain when you need to download material from your hardware suppliers' web sites.
I can't imagine those South Americans being able to access anything without clearing twenty Cloudflare CAPTCHAs (I don't think Cloudflare operates in China), but then again, I think they'll just blame Cloudflare for sabotaging their perfectly safe 100% legit web traffic.
This type of blocking wouldn't be necessary if these companies actually did something with the abuse reports they receive, but I guess blocking SSH and telnet is an easy way to stop the flood of reports coming in if you don't care about your customers.
After a few decades of having your software’s ass handed to it though, is it so unreasonable to stop asking “why not” and instead start asking “why the fuck should we?”