The truth is that Nostr is, by design, at least somewhat resistant to corporate censorship, but probably not governmental censorship, at least not alone.
Luckily, a lot of censorship *is* done by corporations, not for compliance with the law, but merely as a matter of company policy, so this makes Nostr quite useful.

For there to be resistance, however, people need to actually care. Developers of clients and admins of relays alike have to care. They have to have free speech as a goal.
Everyone has the right to develop clients in any way and censor anything on their own relays. But the best contribution to the ecosystem is one that maximizes freedom of speech and the general culture should hold free speech as the goal.
This would make the system resistant to those attempts to censor which would still exist.

I think it'd be nice to have public free relays run by trusted non-profits with free speech as the stated mission. 

 Destiny for freedom tech: doomed to fail or devs go to jail. Look at samurai, tornado cash, silk road, wikileaks, and any attempt of digital currency before Bitcoin.

If nostr does not grow and is not a threat to elites then all this talk is hot air to make ourselves feel like we’re doing something important.

The theory doesn’t matter if what we’re doing doesn’t matter. Nostr is a bunch of plebs saying gm and trying to make a friendly social atmosphere not actually an attempt to empower ourselves by undermining those with real power (like wikileaks). Your talk of censorship resistance is all theory until someone tries to censor.