The big difference is that in a cashless society where everyone is on the same digital banking system, an abusive leader can delete large minorities of people from participation in the system with the stroke of a key. If they wanted to do that today, it would require a much larger commitment of resources that's going to be harder to justify and execute on, and more easily fought against.

Many of the arguments for privacy focused technologies is not that it should be impossible for the government to infiltrate or disrupt your life, but that it should be somewhat impossible for the government to infiltrate or disrupt millions of people's lives for the tiny cost of some compute cycles. The former is necessary for law enforcement. The latter is a recipe for genocide.