AML laws enforce monitoring so that legitimate businesses have to block or report activity, assisting law enforcement in tracing said criminal activity. It's the most effective way. As the famous saying goes: follow the money.

You're correct on the privacy implications. It's shocking how much data AML monitoring companies have collected about you, there's more data points than any single person could think up. These aren't entities owned by the government - they're private companies.

Also yes money laundering does not require cash but I think the author is highlighting the scale of it. Most countries tax consumption a.k.a VAT and 'hidden transactions' such as cash transactions bypass that.

You can be anti-anti-money-laundering but then you also either have to be a complete anarchist or completely anti-taxation and anti-data-collection by corporations and yet still have a reasonable argument for how this will result in the ability for society to have a government.

I'm not saying the system is perfect - far from any means. However the utopia you describe seems infeasible to me.