with the only way to fully dismantle them would be to shutoff all access to the Internet

I don’t think this is true. It’s a bit complicated because there are ways to obfuscate the traffic, but generally speaking, I’d assume governments could track and block nodes just as easily as you can find them.

Tor is slow

It might trip you up for real-time things like gaming and you might take a while to download HUGE files, but it’s much faster than its historical reputation

and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers

This is true for any privacy software. Encrypted chats, cryptographic currency, darknets.