Kind of. It is very complex and I could write an essay, but to put it short, if you receive let's say a SWIFT transfer in USD, EUR, whatever, it will be forcibly converted to ARS (local currency) at an unfair rate: if you tried to buy back USD with the ARS you received, you could only get half of the original amount. It's almost like a 50% tax on any international wire.

Anyway people use crypto for much more than bypassing that. Some are interested in holding crypto, some are interested in holding stable coins, some to arbitrage, and so on. To be clear crypto is not used in day to day transactions (buying coffee) in any shape or form.

> And they're all going through intermediaries

I'm not sure what you mean by this? People here use both Binance/CeXes and hardware wallets the same way it's used in any other country. And unlike other countries, here (because there was already a massive black market for physical US bills) you can very easily trade face to face relatively large amounts (1k-100k USD) of US bills for USDT/USDC. Which is cool because it's the true decentralized way to on-ramp/off-ramp crypto.