They can sanction whoever they want. There isn't a procedure involving oversight. Sanctioning open source code rather than a company or individual is a first.
A better example than Signal would be SecureDrop which exists to facilitate leaks largely considered illegal by the US.
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The way this stuff works is not by any principles or precedents. There are not slippery slopes. Governments will fight things they deem threats. We fight back when the specific thing is justifiably worth fighting for, not when its coinbro cryptofash upset they can't launder money
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Around 1/4 of donations to GrapheneOS over the past couple years have been via Monero. We currently primarily send money to developers internationally via Bitcoin. An advantage of Monero, Zcash, Tornado Cash, etc. for that would be making it a lot harder for people to get doxxed.
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I appreciate that you and other projects are able to receive donations through cryptocurrency while it exists and don't fault you for that. At the same time I can believe that it all should be shut down this way, and should have been long ago before it took hold.
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Tornado Cash still works fine despite them sanctioning it. It can still be used by criminals to hide their activities among other criminals. It can still be used by law abiding people in countries not subject to US law, although a lot of countries do enforce these US laws.
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It would work but wouldn't do anything useful if there were no practical way to convert the toy money into real money.
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You don't need a centralized exchange to convert Ethereum to USD and not all centralized exchanges care about US laws / sanctions. There are decentralized exchanges including for exchanging cash for Bitcoin.
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If the exchanges were all black market you'd have little recourse if they just took your toy money and ran (as many of them do already).
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Decentralized exchanges can do atomic swaps between cryptocurrencies including stablecoins where you don't trust the exchange. There are also ones facilitating people doing cash exchanges where they essentially act like eBay and have systems for reputation tracking, etc.
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You're assuming those are worth anything, but they're not if they're all treated as criminal enterprises with no way to exchange for real money without involving criminal organizations.
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None of that is currently a crime. They could make it into a crime, and then by definition it's only used by criminals going forward, which is what they did with Tornado Cash. That can be done with anything of course.