While knowledge of VPNs is huge, their use is not as large as you posit. I would argue instead that the real reason many young Chinese don't really care what the "great firewall" does is that they're almost exclusively using the domestic Chinese internet. Browsing in simplified Chinese, there's rarely a need to access the outside internet.
Perhaps it's not; I spent most of my time among very internationally-oriented, business-minded English speakers, which is by no means a fair sample, but it's not an insignificant subset, either. I'm most concerned about VPNs as the only possible path to avoid censorship on a large scale.
