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?
The data, it's a huge asset. Chipmixer owner could probably use the data to analyze how effective the mixer was and improve mixing even further. You know address that deposits, address that receives, address that sends, then you move coins from one address to another and so on. By the way, 7TB can be a speculation to frighten people and make them believe that no mixer follows its no-log promise and they are all dangerous. Makes sense, right? But no one knows the truth.
What do you think the merchants that receive funds from you marked to be from a mixer and possibly even from criminal activity think? Your beliefs might be cute in your head, but when you're doing things that can get other people's businesses caught up in criminal investigations that doesn't make you a hero for privacy, it makes you an asshole.
What if get the bill from a cashier that someone used to snort cocaine? Will I be in trouble because someone found coke's traces on that? No, right? So, why should merchants get caught up in criminal investigations? Doesn't make sense, they receive money what their customers give to them, since when is it merchants' duty to check the source of money? 514 billion USD was laundered through JP Morgan? Who got in trouble? Why didn't government got in trouble? What are they doing? They aren't doing their job, it's not a good job when billions of dollars are laundered in your country. Why aren't all the JP Morgan, US Treasury and FED staff in prisons? Why doesn't government staff get pushed for their mistakes?
Accepting funds that have been illegally obtained is illegal.
Billions were laundered through JP Morgan. Should merchants accept payments done via that bank?
Relying on 3rd parties is against everything Bitcoin represents in my opinion. The exact opposite of self sovereignty.
That's a good point but we still and probably will rely forever on developers, miners, node runners and so on.