Likely because it's one of the few VPNs with a ~reliable free tier

Akamai is also a CDN that [works for domain fronting][1], which is an amazingly reliable way to get around the Chinese Firewall via [Collateral Freedom][2].

Tor's meek used Azure for domain fronting.

Akamai likely faced some pressure from the govt because of this.

[1]: https://github.com/vysecurity/DomainFrontingLists/blob/maste...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_freedom

With fastly stopping df last year and cloudflare a while before that it seems like tor/snowflake options are dwindling fast