> Funnily enough, not setting the SNI and connecting the the origin IP, and then requesting the page worked fine.

Such tricks, called "domain fronting" are why ECH exists. The problem is that although domain fronting is effective for the client it's a significant headache for the provider. Big providers involved, such as Cloudflare have always insisted that they want to provide this sort of censorship resisting capability but they don't want to authorize domain fronting because it's a headache for them technically.

Let me explain the headache with an example. Say I'm Grand Corp, a French company with 25 million web sites including both cats-are-great.example and fuck-trump.example. Users discover that although the US government has used Emergency Powers to prohibit access to fuck-trump.example, using domain fronting they can connect to cats-are-great.example and request fuck-trump.example pages anyway and the US government's blocking rules can't stop them.

What they don't know is that I, Grand Corp had been sharding sites 25 ways, so there was only 1-in-25 chance that this worked - it so happened cats-are-great and fuck-trump were in the same shard, On Thursday during routine software upgrade we happen to switch to 32-way sharding and suddenly it stops working - users are outraged, are the French surrendering to Donald Trump?

Or, maybe as a fallback mechanism the other 31 servers can loop back around to fetch your fuck-trump.example pages from the server where they live, but in doing so they double the effective system load. So now my operational costs at Grand Corp for fuck-trump.example doubled because clients were fronting. Ouch.