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Agreed, the regime even in totalitarian system doesn't care about the free speech of the raving guy on the street corner. But where does that leave us with respect to "the rule of law" for any group which participates in the political system at all?
The US currently, right now, engages in vast violation of the 1st Amendment rights and "free speech" rights of its citizens. The Biden Administration saw a vast complex of both government and government financed NGOs which worked diligently through carrots and sticks to coerce social media companies to engage in vast censorship of American citizens, including financing overseas NGOs to lobby governments to ban and threaten those social media companies. There are dozens of lawsuits showing this to be the case. There were group chats within these companies of "former" intelligence officials who were coordinating with their government colleagues to direct and enforce this censorship.
Sure, you can show how pretty much all actions and statements by the government during the covid response were bullshit, but then you'll lose your bank account, you will be banned from government grants (thus making you unemployable in academia), you'll be banned from social media companies, and you'll be banned from payment processors, and any licensing boards you're apart of, e.g., lawyers and doctors, will attack your ability to practice your profession. So as long as you don't care to have any job with any power or influence, you had "free speech" off the internet but also you couldn't go to public places because no one was there and businesses and social gatherings were banned. We don't have to go back to the 1960s to see what the US Government does to attack dissidents and violate free speech; we have rampant examples in the last few years.
"Checks and balances" is an illusion. The separation of power between various factions of government requires them to have actual power and also requires them to not be the same people, but in the modern era they are the same people and a part of the same faction. The "rule of law" is an illusion, it only looks that way because victims of the violations have power. When they don't have power, the law is no hurdle. One faction punishing the other faction for its wanton violation and weaponization is necessary if you want to get back to a détente which can be inaccurately described as "rule of law."
You say "social pressure" is enough, but that social pressure is currently manufactured through this vast web of government money and overreach. Its power is just as serious as the beatings on the street, except it's more deniable. Spread out, faceless total state is worse than a system with an actual knowable and identifiable sovereign. "Social pressure" is used, just like during the Covid Hysteria, to create a minority small enough and powerless enough so that more explicit use of power can be brought to bare to force the dissidents to conform and then that will be attempted.
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