I have looked (or at least paid close attention) and I am unaware of anyone in Ukraine, Turkey or Hong Kong using hidden services for political reasons.
Additionally, Tor gets way less traffic from people trying to evade national firewalls than VPN services do. They aren't the big fish in that space at all.
Besides, I'm not sure what your point is. Societies don't tend to judge a thing by whether there's a single good use, somewhere. They weigh things up.
Hidden services can be enumerated, so it's not impossible to find one if there's some awesome hidden service somewhere. But such a site would get a lot of attention very quickly. It wouldn't be secret very long.
Hopefully this whole story will amount to nothing. It'd be very sad if Tor disappeared. But let's face it - when you have the Prime Minister of a technically advanced western country tasking one of the worlds most advanced intelligence agencies with "break the dark web" they were going to hit serious problems sooner or later anyway. And mostly that's because of hidden services. It'd be a crying shame if this one feature with hardly any legitimate usage caused the entire project to tank.
Societies don't 'weigh' anything up. Governments with idealogical leanings make decisions regardless of evidence. You only have to look at the 'war on drugs' to see how, regardless of the evidence put before them, politicians will blindly follow their ideologies. 'Weighing up' implies a reasoned judgement, based on the arguments for and against and based on the available evidence. To think that the UK or US (or any other) government works that way is naive.
Additionally, Tor gets way less traffic from people trying to evade national firewalls than VPN services do. They aren't the big fish in that space at all.