I worked for quite some time as a network engineer in a Syrian company.

I'll be honest here, sanctions only slows the internet down because of the VPN overhead, so does the government with its stupid proxies and single point of connection for the whole country, but is it stopping us from doing our job? no.

Censorship:
Back in 2010-2011, just before the revolution, ADSL subs were growing fast, government censorship getting tighter. Facebook, Youtube, even Amazon (they don't deliver to Syria tho), are banned. With more websites adopting ssl and people getting more educated about its benefits, government started doing Man-in-the-middle attacks causing the red ugly warning. Fortunately, that didn't last too long, thanks to free VPN services(yes we gave up privacy to foreign firms, to escape local censorship), I believe the government saw that it's attacks are causing people to be more aware of their security rather than helping it in identifying and arresting activists.
Luckily most websites use https now. Until recently we didn't have a local ban issue since all the block was done by local forwarding proxies configured to filter certain domains, and only plain http traffic was processed there. I remember seeing Blue Coat hardware being used in some official departments, not sure though if this was used on a larger scale. That was the way to block things, in addition to blocking a few dozens of IP addresses.
Now government is trying to tighten the censorship on messaging and VoIP apps to raise the profit for local telecom companies, which are (surprise!) largely owned indirectly by the president through loyal (shadow?) businessmen. They have blocked most connections to Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger, their method is not perfect, but most of the people are using proxies like psiphon or even getting a paid subscription. They will probably try to block the proxies too in the coming years (they are very slow tbh). I heard that they are promoting local VPN services, but didn't find anything relevant, though it's highly possible like the Iranian case.

Sanctions:
It's a real pain, especially when it comes to payment, but thanks to diaspora and UAE (which serves the main breathing point for the Syrian companies to avoid sanctions), we have a way to pay for and buy stuff.
Now comes the online services, which are blocked by US based companies. We're still using proxies for most of the services, but since few years, most ISPs started implementing their own remote proxy service outside of Syria and passing them some traffic, thus unblocking some services like Apple Store, Google Play, and even Snapchat. But for us devs we still have to use proxies to access AWS, GCP (and everything hosted there), Docker, Bitbucket, Gitlab, everything related to android dev, and many other services.
Can the government unblock these to help locals do their work? yes. Will they? probably no, they don't need to do so. Since they can get to Dubai or Paris and enjoy their time there it's all fine.
BTW, some people who can afford to live quite a luxurious life have Netflix subscriptions.

Tor? haven't used it since the early days of the revolution. Bad network connection with our crappy infrastructure makes tor dead slow.

Personal Opinion: sanctions or not, foreign companies who want to work in Syria, or Syrian companies that want to work for foreign clients, both found ways to bypass it. We have German companies employing Syrians, I worked for a British firm last year. After all, who wouldn't prefer to pay someone $400/mo to get work done than say $1500/mo? not to mention insurance and taxes. Same for locals, even $300/mo is still very good compared to what most companies offer, for an IT guy at least.
Finally, we need a new democratic Syria, by helping Syrians people take the lead and rule themselves freely, weakening Assad's family grip, but the government and its strongmen are finding their way to bypass sanctions, so do sanctions really help or are they only affecting the poor? I have mixed feeling.
But had the sanctions been meant to help Syrians, they would have confiscated Assad's family and their loyalist crimes supporters billions in the West.