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The article directly addresses this with it's list of requirements. Perhaps another privacy coin like Grin would be a better suggestion that at least fits most of their requirements.

A common trick in government is to identify the preferred solution first, and then reverse engineer a set of requirements only met by that one single solution.

I presume the real unstated requirement boils down to "Moxie is associated with the cryptocurrency." Not disclosed is whether he or Signal have financial interests in its adoption (they have said they don't "hold" any of these pre-mined coins, but that's all they'll say).

They could have even used AZTEC's Ethereum layer 2 solution of scalable and private stablecoin payments:

https://zk.money/

From my understanding that's just obfuscation and not a real privacy layer

What's the difference?

Obfuscation just makes it difficult to track. Real privacy makes it impossible by breaking the links.

How does AZTEC's smart contracts not break the links?

This has been addressed on dozens of occasions

or Aeon, which is Monero's cousin that's meant for something like this