In practice, Bitcoin's privacy model was never even tried though. BTC fees are so prohibitively expensive that no wallet or user would generate more UTXOs or transactions than they have to, making it trivial to trace, yes. But if BTC had been allowed to scale like it was originally designed, then wallets would not fear inputting and outputting potentially hundreds of UTXOs in every transaction of varying amounts so that it becomes practically impossible to trace.
On Bitcoin SV, basically a high-scale version of Bitcoin, there are today several wallets taking smarter approaches to privacy. HandCash's Output Bills [1] for example splits outputs into fixed denominations like cash, and Paymail [2] is a email-like addressing scheme to avoid sharing addresses publicly. I'm sure more approaches will be tried too now that wallets have some freedom to experiment.
[1] https://handcash.medium.com/introducing-output-bills-a-coin-...