the term "money laundering" is the anti-euphemism of "financial privacy". It's a highly successful attack on privacy. It's been drilled into our heads that privacy is bad, and it won't stop there.
I worked on financial and messaging privacy tech and cryptography. I came to the conclusion that there were very few genuine and good reasons for complete anonymity and privacy in finance. This doesn't mean that everything should be completely public, but equally everything being completely hidden is not a desirable state for society either, unless you are a criminal.
Poor privacy weakens security in general, doesn't matter what type of data it is.
Meanwhile breaking privacy does not stop terrorists or criminals. They always find a way.
again, "money laundering" is really data privacy when you distil the issue, and the term certainly is an anti euphemism, specifically made up to attack privacy.
Security and privacy are not the same thing. In some cases, privacy is also a security concern (e.g. criticising the state in repressive regimes) but mostly absolute privacy is not required, only partial privacy. In most cases, a lack of privacy does not massively weaken security.
For the record, I am passionate about privacy. I intensely dislike surveillance capitalism and think that the state should not be able to conduct mass surveillance. Warrants for targeted surveillance should be controlled by the courts.
However, this has to be balanced against real money laundering and other criminal enablement concerns (such as ransomware and other crimes enabled by untraceable payments). Money laundering is simply how organised crime take the proceeds of their activity and legitimise it. It is extremely naive to frame attempts to detect and control this as an attack on privacy, even if this is an undesirable effect of it.
My point is that absolutism in privacy is as bad as absolutism tends to be anywhere else it appears. The real world needs balance. We definitely need privacy, but not absolute privacy at the cost of everything else.
Update: I would just like to respond to your point that these controls have not stopped terrorism or money laundering, and that they will always find a way. I don't disagree with that, but having no control at all over this would enable them to a far greater extent and lower their costs substantially.
This is sorta like saying the US government introduced the Communications Act of 1934 because they had predicted the internet and wanted to normalize the idea of wiretapping so there would be less friction to introducing mass surveillance 75 years later.
The US government does do a lot of horrible things that violate the rights of its citizens, but they also really don't like organized crime and terrorism. Not everything is an explicit attack on privacy.