This is often misunderstood.

Public blockchain as in "anyone can audit it " aka no "trust me bro".

Monero is a public blockchain too, except it's opaque. It can still be verified just the same, at the cost of more computation and with the slightly added risk of there potentially being a bug in critical parts of the cryptography that makes the opaqueness possible.

A public blockchain without privacy is just a surveillance machine.

Without thinking, people have been busy normalizing that for a decade and a half now.