Monero miners cannot see the sender address, the receiver address, or the transaction amount. I don't know if they finished Dandelion which is supposed to remove the link between the transaction and the IP submitting it. As far as I know, without Dandelion, it can be censored by IP address if the people running the miners are paying attention to that part of the network, otherwise Monero cannot be censored like Bitcoin can be.

When no transaction information is given, all transactions are indistinguishable. Isn't privacy beautiful?

Correct. There is no meaningful basis for censorship in a Monero transaction.

The sender, amount, receiver and IP address are all essentially hidden or unavailable.

Miner can still decide to censor all transactions, random transactions, transactions over certain KB size, etc - but that is probably not very useful, except maybe to attack the network as a whole.

> Grassroots?

Monero has no premine, dev tax and is a 100% open source project with volunteer contributors. It's about as grassroots as it gets in the cryptocurrency space.

> so the vast majority of XRM was "mined" by a small group of traditional speculative capitalists.

While the cripple mine happened, it only lasted a couple weeks and all of these coins were sold at market value. Monero was worthless for the first couple years.

Monero has a tail emission / infinite supply making it fairer than fixed supply coins.

Disclaimer: Monero contributor