Motivated actors could influence ethereum ecosystem/foundation to NOT transition to privacy-by-default -addresses?

Edit: title should end with "stealth-addresses". Somehow accidentally deleted it.

Over the past I've come across multiple instances in the news, where motivated actors (govt, media, etc.) act against privacy tools and also privacy coins etc. You can find plenty of examples online on that - and there are even gag letters, which companies get where they are forced to implement certain backdoors into their cloud services and they're not allowed to tell anyone about it.

And that's only the stuff we know about.

With this agenda, privacy coins/tools like Monero, Tornado Cash, etc. ars also targeted. I won't discuss the relationship to money laundering now. But the point is, that these actors have lots of incentives to discourage widespread usage of these things. The popularity of bitcoin and ethereum is likely not too strongly attacked, because the Blockchains are completely public and it's easy for existing large scale data globbling systems to connect people via their KYC at exchanges to their wallet addresses.

My hypothesis is, that when ethereum eventually moves to a privacy-by-default stealth address-based system, these actors will use lots of power and techniques to avoid this from happening. They could use all kinds of nice and not-so-nice techniques and for instance keep the ethereum foundation from actually working on this.

As the saying goes (afaik). The bear won't attack you, as long as you don't attack/threaten it's power. The ethereum foundation would probably have been much more in cross-fire if ethereum had been privacy-first since the beginning.

My worry is, that our goals of privacy in the future could get sabotaged/stopped - leaving us with an incomplete Blockchain and unfulfilled vision.

Yes, there will be still privacy L2s and smart contracts. But they don't work as good, if they are opt-in. After NSA revelations, everyone started taking encryption seriously. Encryption is opt-out now. All by default is encrypted. Privacy should be opt-out and not opt-in.

What do you guys think about this?