I see your point, and can say I know some that have felt very conflicted about linking exactly for the reasons you mentioned.

I agree that byteball team is very much trusted here and most importantly strive to be trusted by new comers which will increasingly come everyday.
Trust was achieved by constantly being transparent and many other actions that we witnessed  , but it also can be lost in a wink.

About your concern I can not see a way out, except by constantly striving to keep your bitcoin and byteball anonymous all the time (very difficult, I know).
What I mean is that when both your bitcoin (difficult but doable) and your bytes (very easy) cannot be easily linked back to you, it becomes less of a concern if your bitcoin could be linked, in a certain point in time, to your bytes and vice-versa.

For byteball privacy I think it suffices to use something like whonix (see page 64 of this thread instructions on how to setup; it worked for me; please forget about "git clone" and just grab "source code zip" on https://github.com/byteball/byteball/releases of last byteball version, create /home/user/byteball directory and unzip content inside) which, before tonych finish implementing sock5/tor support in desktop wallet, can solve the problem of reveling your ip (I think this problem plagues almost all crypto currencies there are, it's not in any way about byteball exclusively). Even when we have tor support in byteball desktop wallet, some may still use whonix just to be (almost) sure of no licking (as we could recently see in a dependency (nw.js) which licked ip).
Besides of that, byteball privacy is still relatively easy, as you can still trade byteball without exposure to KYC/AML mechanisms (make sure to properly mix bitcoin you use to buy or receive for selling bytes, and use exchange via torbrowser).