I mean, bitcoin is a lot more anonymous if you host your own wallet and don't cash out through an exchange (or don't cash out at all) - you're just a number. That's definitely not the modal use case today (where its primary use is as a vehicle for ~~gambling~~financial speculation denominated in dollars), but was a lot more common 10 years ago when that project was created.

Or you just use a crypto currency with anonymity build in.

Sure, but that was probably pretty hard to do ten years ago when this was being developed, because, y'know, Monero didn't exist yet (or had only existed for a few months and had no users)

Also, bitcoin actually was more private back then, because KYC rules were much more lax.