You're starting to see a few references to Monero in the mainstream news - mainly about these hackers who are exploiting scale scale software and ransoming back encrypted data to a variety of businesses. It seems like it is trapped in a catch-22 situation where it is not being used on a wide enough scale to hide the ill-gotten gains and won't be used until that is possible. When criminals start using it a large scale is when it will have broken that challenge and might start to attract larger scale investors.
Have connections to criminal activities sounds not good but I got your point. Monero is created for all people who want to have private anonymous transactions but it was not created for only criminals. Criminals involve in many things, Bitcoin as well and with Monero, they don't even have to use third party tumblers. Very convenient.
On the flipside - Bitcoin has been moderately tolerated by governments because it is "less" anonymous than Monero, but anything creating greater difficulty might be subject to bans much more quickly.
It is another side of a coin, if Bitcoin had not soared to $64k, it would have not been challenged with many fud, policies, regulations since May.