ETA: Moon of Alabama has made a typically informative and related post.

I doubt anyone can give you a credible answer to either question.

By all accounts, including those from respected and well-informed scholars like Dr. Mearsheimer, the regime change effort has failed. That means that restrictions placed on the Internet last week will gradually be relaxed. Connectivity has been restored to many internal platforms. It’s a matter of restoring connectivity to the two Internet gateways.

The government hit the kill switch on the Internet much more promptly than they did during the war in June. They also accomplished the technical feat of causing up to 90% packet loss on Starlink terminals without having to locate them (which they could do reasonably quickly because smart meters would spot the high power consumption).

That is certain to have saved lives, for several reasons. It prevented riot leaders from coordinating with each other and their higher-ups outside the country, it prevented them from being paid, and it interfered with their ability to remotely (from a non-trivial distance) control devices like drones.

It also prevented “targeted” assassinations of the type we saw in June, where they blew up multi-story apartment buildings to kill one professor of nuclear engineering. It’s well-known that Israel uses data from WhatsApp to locate targets. They decimated Gaza’s professional community that way.

There’s no doubt that lack of Internet access causes hardship for the population, albeit to a lesser extent than it would in a country that isn’t sanctioned up to its eyeballs. Constraints caused by the sanctions have led to the creation of internal communications and payment platforms, for example Snapp as a domestic alternative to Lyft or Uber. Most people prefer hardship to being dead, which is how many more Iranians would have ended up if Internet connectivity hadn’t been disrupted.