This all seems pretty exaggerated. It just isn't that hard to get privacy out of Bitcoin. If everyone agrees on the simplest and scarcest and first asset, it really is reasonable that they wouldn't simultaneously give that up in favor of a value system that is infinite but more private by default. They may not even agree that it's a worthwhile tradeoff, since scarcity has always been the most important feature of money.

That could change in the future, when everyone is paying for their coffee with crypto, and mining Monero on their laptop just for funsies. But we're several years from that point at least. That's a monetary superhighway, while we're still on wagon trails. But this trail is being blazed by scarcity as a primary feature, not privacy. Scarce is the one thing all money has tried to be for thousands of years. That's why gold was money.