Can we never know who this address belongs to? Is it impossible to find the addressee's identity?
unless the owner of a bitcoin address tells us we have little to no way of finding that out.
what you can do is to search all the addresses that sent to or received bitcoin from the said address. you can find out if there are any other addresses linked with the said address (used both in same transaction as input) then find out who those addresses belong to and find a
possible link between a real person, possibly a service like an exchange and those addresses.
check out walletexplorer.com too.