Governments are going after centralized mixers. I would question the legality of the government running a mixer as a 'honeypot' for more than a short period of time, although they can seize any logs the mixer was keeping, regardless of any public claims to the contrary.
Eh, depending on the mixer. For all we know, ChipMixer wasn't keeping logs. What's the point of keeping logs if you are not a honeypot?
I think most of the coins that flow through mixers are from petty scammers and signature spammers who are taking precautions to cover up their own shady activity in order for it to continue.
I had used ChipMixer to not reveal to my merchants that the funds come from signature campaigns. It costed zero, and it was fast. I'm pretty sure lots of other clients thought it this way.
Centralized solutions will obviously never solve the privacy problem.
But decentralized solutions will solve the "shady and criminal activity" problem... I'll never understand your perspective.