Once you bust one vendor or market, it’s pretty easy to take that list of customers and subpoena Coinbase/etc to get some low-hanging fruit. Buying in cash is good but increasingly rare nowadays and expensive. In the current legal climate, traceability is primarily a concern for vendors and markets. Most places will not sell via BTC, or charge you an extra fee because they have to run it through mixers. But who knows how US policy might change in the future, or if better chain analysis products might tempt law enforcement to keep putting in the same amount of effort with many more arrests to show for it. Once it’s on chain it’s there forever; don’t make the mistakes of the early Bitcoiners.

(On a practical level XMR has much smaller transaction fees)