In this case the provider will refuse to do submarine swap.

Tornado is not centralized, it's an unupgradeable smart contract. But the important part is that evil NK hackers laundered money through Tornado.

Now instead of using Tornado they will launder Bitcoin like this:

... and they're left with clean Bitcoin. Do you see now why LN might be the next target of sanctions?

And Fedimints are basically mini-Tornados with LN support.

You are looking at techniques to accomplish the same thing. One works poorly relative to the other, but the results are roughly similar. One is easily blocked the other is not. So as a technique, yes Tornado mixer is a worse approach.

My problem is not necessarily with a centralized mixer but with the regulations that make using a mixer a prohibited activity. But in the current environment, absolutely that Tornado mixer getting banned should not come as a surprise to anyone. We knew governments would fight back. And not only will this be the extent of it, I am pretty sure they haven't even yet begun to fight.

Chris Belcher working on CoinSwap is an example.

The list also tries to restrain every US citizen to prevent them from publishing text (i.e. transactions) that eth wallets interpret as a payment to tornado cash: https://www.coincenter.org/u-s-treasury-sanction-of-privacy-tools-places-sweeping-restrictions-on-all-americans/

People who publish such text anyway (even in a format such as a physical book) are apparently in violation of OFAC and subject to prosecution. But in order to punish them OFAC has to examine the transaction they published (i.e. some text they wrote) and prosecute them for its contents. This is grounds for a lawsuit for violating the first amendment.