Trying not to sound like a pedantic adversarial smarmy douche...
Keyword on these low power things is "mesh," right?
So what's a mesh network? It's actually infrastructure-heavy, it's just that every participant is part of the infrastructure, so you don't see typical infrastructure. But it's there. At the frequency and power levels of LoRa etc, you're gonna need friends every half mile or so.. This is not a technology that acts like HTs and mobile radios.
If you have a neighborhood with lots of folks on board, or If you have a large property and you can put nodes wherever you want, those would be successful implementations.
Taking a LoRa module next time you're camping in the hills I think would be as useful as taking and electric Turkey carving knife. Now...if you're going camping with a bunch of people and they all have one, that might be useful, but nobody out of range or blocked by terrain is gonna get your comms.
That said, I'm intrigued by it, and interested in hearing real world results. My understanding is probably faulty and definitely incomplete.