If you rely on systems that involve implicit custodial trust (i.e. not crypto) to coordinate with your homies, and you have powerful adversaries, your adversaries will compel those custodians to prevent you from communicating with your homies. They also might find you and hurt you.
This happened with thepiratebay and DNS. It happened with wikileaks and paypal. It happened at the ISP level with Signal during recent unrest in Iran. It happens with the US banking system anytime somebody manages to get somebody else on one of the OFAC lists. It happens to would-be radicals on twitter all the time.
On the other hand, systems that don't involve implicit custodial trust don't have these problems, which is why journalists in China occasionally publish on Ethereum, because the Chinese censors don't have a single-point-of-failure to attack.
I don't think that currencies are an especially interesting application (although the wikileaks case is an example where they are relevant to group coordination). It's just that the currencies are what gets hyped because they're relevant to the investment side--without them, there's less money to build the other stuff.
Another example which I expect to emerge, but which I don't think has been developed yet, would be the use of NFT's in a successor system. If the leader of a movement gets apprehended or incapacitated and they don't check in after a certain number of blocks, then a contract moves the leadership token to their successor. This denotes the successor's signing keys as authoritative, and the leader's (presumably compromised) keys as deprecated. If you keep signatures on-chain you can also tell which ones were registered at a time when they were valid.
You couldn't do this on AWS, somebody would just compel AWS to remove the data they don't like, you need something like a blockchain. But it only works if enough people are running nodes to make attacking all of the node operators infeasible. For that you need to provide incentives, and now we're back to cryptocurrency.
For me it comes down to whether you think dissent is more important than preventing all of the shady business that goes on in secret online. I do, so I'm pro-crypto. The currency bit is an ugly necessity which I hope we can find a way to get rid of.