I thought that the whole point of crypto was money laundering and tax evasion. Like, it's in cryptocurrency DNA, even if people try to squint and see legitimate use cases. Does anyone think otherwise?

I mean, that's what the big mean government does, they monitor financial transactions and they collect taxes. But when we talk about financial privacy from the prying eyes of the government as a goal, and let's suppose people actually use crypto like was dreamed, this necessarily implies crypto being a tool to launder money. (in practice, this is better realized by privacy coins like Monero and ZCash, since Bitcoin sucks for privacy: your address is an anonymous handle but the network leak metadata. But, the desire for financial privacy was there in the Bitcoin community since the beginning).

And what else people do when they can hide their money from the government? In a lot of cases, they don't pay taxes (which is also a disposition present in the Bitcoin community since the beginning, with a rhetoric like, collecting taxes are not legitimate)

What I think was a later development was the main use case for crypto in real world, which is to collect payment for ransomware and things like this. This, I don't think it's something the early Bitcoin community envisioned.