I tend to agree with him on this and I really don't understand why nothing has been done regarding that for years, unless this was done intentional.
It
is intentional. "We" want to make it into the system. And, to make it into the system means to have tradeoffs. Trading privacy kind of tradeoffs.
That is simply impossible because Bitcoin was not designed that way. If we add privacy features into the existing protocol (eg. though some weird soft fork) that won't fix anything because opt-in privacy is not improving the whole system.
Why not? RingCT in Monero wasn't a thing back in 2016, and it got implemented in January 2017. XMR amounts hidden, boom. More privacy gained. Bitcoin could have optional privacy with softforking to confidential transactions and ring signatures. It's just that we want it to enter the system like a trojan horse, therefore we can't risk with stuff like that.