In cryptocurrency the ideal which Satosi Nakamoto wanted was to keep in decentralized and being anonynous.
I don't think the ideal of Satoshi was to keep it necessarily anonymous (prove me wrong if I am not well informed, please), otherwise he would not have created Bitcoin in its pseudonymous form.
While KYC is being abused and it supposes many potential threads for the individual, there are a few services where it seems legit to fulfil it, IMO. In Laws, there are some documents which are "nominative", and it is reasonable that these require KYC in crypto too, until a better ID technology is developed (AFAIK there are some crypto projects out there already working on it, thus, providing prove about your identity without disclosing it).
Yes, of course, KYC everywhere is unjustifiable and dangerous, but I'm not so sure as the OP about its uselessness in each and every case.