Is this a long term trend?
It got pretty much unnoticed on HN, that Europe recently voted to make all crypto payments illegal unless the seller collects the personal data of the buyer. Independent of the amount. So there will be a track record of everything bought via crypto.
Is it only a matter of time until cash is going away globally, and states have access to everything their people buy?
Regarding end-2-end encryption: It does not prevent a government from reading your messages anyhow. They could instruct Meta (or whichever company is in control of the app you use) to send them the the messages you write directly from your phone. Or from the phone of the receiver. Or to send them the private key from your phone. They could also ask Apple or Google to do so, since those have acceess to everything on your phone.
But in theory if you could pay for groceries with monero (you can't afaik), you could pay from the same wallet you conducted a hack from or purchased a darknet server to host leaked data with. The grocery store wouldn't know the originating wallet or any of its other activity.
Anyone who thinks grocery stores are going to allow monero payments is pretty naive, but Monero at least makes these flows possible.
For example, if Walmart decided to let people pick up orders with monero payments, you'd log in with your walmart account (linked with real name), place your order, pay to the generated wallet address with Monero, and then show ID on pickup. Walmart would have no way of knowing where the money came from.
I don't have any Monero or particularly like it (but mainly because I consider proof of work unsustainable and wasteful). But you have to admit the privacy implications are interesting, and the technology is impressive.