"I’m sorry, but that’s a very poor argument that has no value in the real world, only in some silly hypothetical. (I.e. in practice it actually just works very easily)"
Let's say I'm wrong and put aside the "passive" noderunners thing for the moment for the sake of argument, what I also said is that the vast majority of Bitcoin users don't run a node so are simply trusting others . And in those cases they are in a similar situation, if not worse, than Monero noderunners. Maybe you didn't see it, but like I told BitcoinStu, I don't disagree with anything you're saying about Bitcoin noderunnners.

"It would be extremely obvious if a node software didn’t do the simple job of auditing"
It's not so obvious to me. We have several examples in Bitcoins history where it wasn't necessarily so obvious to everyone running a node. This one required some random anon to even point it out to devs before anyone realized what was going on.
bitcoincore.org/en/2018/09/20/notice

"Funny that you use that example actually, because something like Monero doesn’t get that benefit. If the BTC audit was messed up you *could* check it very easy on pen and paper"
I never claimed that it did. And I agree you *could* with Bitcoin but who *does* in the real world, honestly? If a couple users do this, and do so often, how does it change the fact that 99.9% aren't verifying themselves? They can't claim the benefits of a transparent chain as you are saying because they never take advantage of those properties. I can shout until I'm blue in the face that I *can* do something, but I never actually did it until I *do* it.

"You’d have to disallow any and all use of the old system, essentially a reset, because broken cryptography means you now have no clue how many coins there are"
Pretty sure Zcash kept their supply sound and got around this scenario by using turnstiles, but not an ideal solution for sure (exploiters can leave legit user SooL)

I think we can agree that each method isn't perfect and has it's own downsides (basechain privacy vs basechain auditability)
Each project has different priorities and I think they should follow them to their conclusions
At least that will show us what works in practice (maybe they'll each succeed in a different way)

If I can ultimately transact with strong privacy, on Monero or some layer of Bitcoin, without any severe trade-offs to self-custody or permissionlessness, it's a win/win for me.