the biggest delusion of moneroheads about "anonymity" is that it is an absolute, a mathematical limit, and in engineering, you aim to push things as close to the limit as possible but such limits are inherently impossible to reach

and the cost tends to show up elsewhere, like auditability, and in the case of monero, a high processing cost to validate transactions, some 10 elliptic curve verifications per transaction, or so, compared to just one for bitcoin, and then a hash to the address and a compare

humans confuse absolutes with the finite limitations of physical reality all the time

anonymity is impossible, but high levels of indirection in pseudonymity are easy, and as Tor's engineers determined by many experiments, 3 indirections of pseudonymity is enough, where Monero has more than this, and it's just not worth it, when tracing origins of transactions is still transparent, even if you don't know what it is, you know where it is, and most monero users don't directly validate the chain themselves, and thus querying for this transaction, and knowing the IP address, gone

you have a social graph link