Early on bitcoin was thought to be pseudoanonymous. Like sure, it's all public, but what's public is "bc1qxy2kgdygjrsqtzq2n0yrf2493p83kkfjhx0wlh", not "John Smith, age 43, living in Florida".

Then two things happened: people figured out that it's actually very easy to connect the dots, particularly if somebody ever does something like: "donate here: (hash)".

And, Bitcoin is hard to get into. As soon as difficulty went up, making yourself some went out of the window. Now you have to buy it. And its characteristics mean that anyone selling any online wants to be really, really sure of your identity. Thus near everyone ends up creating accounts at Coinbase or wherever with very accurate identity verification, and now we've got real names connected to those random looking numbers.