Australia

With the irony being I am sure I read an article a few months back about the rise in small scale private encrypted chat applications that some groups are spinning up because they don't trust things like signal.

I concede the point, maybe I am a bit blindsided by the level of knowledge I can bring to bear on this as I wouldn't find it at all difficult to spin something up.

I mean how trivial would it be to insert encrypted packets using a one time pad into meme images, half the conversations between my wife and I would look suspicious under those circumstances, a straightforward sequence of pre shared DSA pairs and the odds of ASIO being able to break it are miniscule.

the number of folks who will run bespoke solutions will be so small that it’ll be insignificant

For the vast majority of people, you are right. But for the very few malignant actors, that is the thing they'll do. It will make ASIO's job harder as they're now trying to trace foreign VPN's, custom-made encryption programs and other stuff that I personally don't know about (I'm not overly knowledgeable about such computer things).

The >99% of Signal users forced into the sunlight aren't the threat. It's the <1% of Signal users who 'go underground' that are the threat.