Yes it is, well, the shady ones that make you part of a botnet are. Those are the ones people are going to predominantly use.
My experiences in the country using VPN stuff was pretty interesting though... it _really_ felt like depending on where you were physically in the country that you were going through completely different censorship pipes. And things like Apple push notifications would just get through no problem so you could at least receive stuff via push from banned apps.
I wonder what kind of detailed explanations of the mechanics there are, because I don't have a mental model of it that works beyond "censors just tell each regional office of national operaors to do stuff and they all do it slightly differently"
I'd be careful if I were you. The police could use that as an excuse to raid you.