To be clear, like the OP, I am not referring to privacy from the government, i.e., so-called "state actors". I am referring to privacy from "tech" companies. Regardless of who develops the methods to trace crypto, or why they do so, history has shown it is "tech" companies, collectively, that have the greatest desire for internet surveillance data and pose the greatest risk to online privacy.
Lets assume Monero is untraceable. Did MasterCard buy a company that cannot deliver on its promise of Monero tracing. In 2020, it was announced that American tax dollars were paid by DHS to CipherTrace for "tools" to trace Monero transactions.
Thought experiment: What is the financial incentive to keep transactions "untraceable". Is it greater than the financial incentive to make transactions traceable.
CipherTrace's tools - by their own admission - can only provide probabilistic analysis and not deterministic analysis.
They'll help in an investigation, but are hardly a silver bullet.
Surely for a government, approaching VISA is far more conveneint
A crypto proponent might argue that transactions are anonymous. However it is impossible to remove entries from the ledger, which is of course public. Hence even if this anonymity was true today it would also have to withstand ever-increasing capabilities of "chain analysis" for an infinite amount of time.
The existence and use of "crypto mixers", e.g., by criminals, suggests identities are indeed traceable.