I built many small community networks over the years.
Those days are behind me now,
someone else may carry on that trade.
All I can say is that yes it can be done.
I do agree that if communities want to be networked and govt do not want to let them, distributed small hubs is the way to go (and hope govt will not put real effort in against them).
we had good long legs up to 35km, but that took effort. Far better to use short range mesh than depend on long range bottlenecks. Wifi is useful for short-leg mesh.