I don't think privacy was ever a primary intention of bitcoin, actually the opposite. One of it's key features is / was the public blockchain.
This is often misunderstood.
Public blockchain as in "anyone can audit it " aka no "trust me bro".
Monero is a public blockchain too, except it's opaque. It can still be verified just the same, at the cost of more computation and with the slightly added risk of there potentially being a bug in critical parts of the cryptography that makes the opaqueness possible.
A public blockchain without privacy is just a surveillance machine.
Without thinking, people have been busy normalizing that for a decade and a half now.
Public blockchain as in "anyone can audit it " aka no "trust me bro".
Monero is a public blockchain too, except it's opaque. It can still be verified just the same, at the cost of more computation and with the slightly added risk of there potentially being a bug in critical parts of the cryptography that makes the opaqueness possible.
A public blockchain without privacy is just a surveillance machine.
Without thinking, people have been busy normalizing that for a decade and a half now.