> I said "the sender knowing the address of he recipient isn't 'tracing the transaction'"

...but that *is* the first step of a trace. If it "isn't tracing" then it obviously "doesn't count" as tracing (in your worldview) so why is it dishonest for me to say so? I'm just pointing out how silly it is to say that "identifying the recipient of tx A" doesn't count as tracing when that's how all tracing starts. Why do all tracers start there if that's not tracing? Why do they always either send money to the target themselves or find someone who already did and get the tx info from them?

To me it is obvious why they do that: because monero makes this part easy, it gives the sender (and anyone they share the data with) cryptographic proof of wat pubkey has the money which allows them to watch the blockchain to see where that pubkey shows up next. This is tracing 101.