Recently, the issue of whether Zcash can be traced has come up again, and Yuxian from SlowMist specifically came out to explain it. Actually, Zcash was never designed to be "fully anonymous for everyone" from the very beginning—it gives you two options: if you want privacy, use a z-address (which truly protects privacy); if you find it troublesome, use a t-address, which is completely transparent and open to any on-chain analysis tools.

This is what's called "optional privacy." Compared to Monero, which defaults to full encryption all the way, Zcash’s approach is obviously more appealing to regulators. You can see how ZEC is still available for trading on major platforms, and that shows how effective this strategy really is. To put it bluntly, the choice of technical path is, to some extent, a game with regulators—either go all-in like Monero, or leave a backdoor for compliance.