“This is the story of the revelation in late 2013 that Bitcoin was, in fact, the opposite of untraceable—that its blockchain would actually allow researchers, tech companies, and law enforcement to trace and identify users with even more transparency than the existing financial system.”
You’re not wrong, but the first words are literally “Just over a decade ago”. It’s not a news article, it’s the story of the research in 2013 which revealed bitcoin isn’t anonymous.
It wasn’t a revelation in 2013 either. The ledger data has always been public information.
But neither the addresses nor the people who had them where. It would be like saying that you can identify someone from an arp table because you can see the mac addresses.
Unless you know specifically who own said address (even to the point that those can be spoofed) you just have a big pile of wet paper.