[hashmash]

The fact that the monitor is public rarely causes issues, and in those cases where it's used on internal objects, it's not really public anyhow.

There's an additional benefit to using the built in monitors, and that has to do with heap allocation. The data structure for managing it is allocated lazily, only when contention is actually encountered. This means that "synchronized" can be used as a relatively low cost defensive coding practice in case an object which isn't intended to be used by multiple threads actually is.