Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps

It would have very little effect, which is why it's not a primary threat now. Despite China's aims, their tech giants have made little headway in pushing their core businesses far outside of China. Huawei is the primary success story in that regard (the US has obviously been aggressively targeting them across the board). Baidu was supposed to conquer the world and defeat Google, it failed miserably and is largely just a China search engine today, nearly all of their revenue comes from China, so sanctions wouldn't do much. China's tech giants are, for the most part, captives within China. ByteDance did manage to build a global phenomenon in TikTok, however that too is now under threat of being turned back.

Sanctions on most parts of China's system will have little effect, similar to how China's retaliatory sanctions on US Senators are largely meaningless.

There are three primary ways to hurt China. 1) Cut them off on technology (eg semiconductors), which is an angle the US is using to an extent. There is some question over how long China will tolerate that before they just start ignoring international rules/laws/norms and start openly steal-cloning the tech they want (I'd bet they won't tolerate it for very long). 2) Humiliate them politically, through isolation & exclusion; cut them out of the global system; that requires a widespread effort from the top several dozen economies, it can be done however. 3) Target their export machine & dollar dependency, cut them off financially from the global economy (USD, Euro and Yen combined entirely dominate the global economy, along with the connected banking & financial systems); this will work for a while, however China is aware of the weak spots and is very aggressively working to build out their domestic service economy to lessen the importance of their exports to their economy, and they're always looking to lessen their dollar dependency.

All that said, China is well beyond the point where you can really restrict them in the sense that you can most nations (like Iran or Venezuela). They've accumulated enough capability, tech, wealth, productivity, infrastructure, domestic know-how, etc. that they are fully free standing now. They have $60 trillion or so in domestic wealth. They have the world's #2 military. They have the world's largest manufacturing engine, and can increasingly manufacture at or near the highest tiers (eg jet engines & planes, semiconductors, etc). They have very few real weak points that can threaten them in a serious sense. The last time it was possible to squeeze China was before the great recession, when their economy was still far smaller than the US & EU, and back then it was hoped that wouldn't be necessary.

So? The issue isn't satellite/aerial imagery being censored, it's that it's being censored to cover up unsavory things. The equivalent in the US would be ICE/CBP detention camps being covered up on maps, but it doesn't look like that's happening: https://www.ice.gov/detention-facilities

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Why would they lose?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik1Y88n1Uog [1] does give the impression of the sort of place where one wishes to avoid the snowmelt line in spring. And that's down in the populated region.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Siberian_Highway says it was first fully paved in 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfbbd-8hbWM

Also in the populated part, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lykov_family detached from their society and went foraging in the wild, but lost most of their tech tree in doing so.

A former soviet colleague told me during perestroika that they planned their taiga field work for winter, because dealing with snow was much easier than dealing with mud.

[1] This clip has "women, horses, and wide open spaces." For "steam-baths, vodka, accordion, and lox" you'll have to do your own searching.