No, that’s a commonly held misconception likely tied to the fact that it was being used by people in conjunction with Silk Road. The public ledger system ties history to the transactions so you can trace the flow back in time. Law enforcement officials probably love that aspect.
Good old fashioned cash is much better for criminal activity.
A crypto like Zcash (another fairly large crypto) that utilizes zk snarks to encrypt transactions and then decouple coins from their history would be much better suited for illegal transactions.
BTC was always about reducing control from a few centralized parties. I don't want my bank or paypal account being arbitrarily frozen.
Nowadays BTC is not very good at transactions due to exorbitant fees + very slow confirmation times, but things like ethereum, bitcoin cash, and altcoins offer options. ETH is very quick.
It can be an equalizer, no doubt about that. Probably the biggest reason I hope it works its way into our culture the way credit and bank card transactions have. That and privacy, which these exchanges have none of.