Monero is definitely not safe. Bitcoins open-ledger is a feature not a bug. Moneros lack of a transparent ledger leaves it vulnerable to hiding exploits found.

There’s a section about privacy in the white paper. The bitcoin privacy tools are cumbersome at best and I’m not a dev. What is there other than mixing and liquid which is a federated side chain. And is lightning really that private?

Bitcoin still lives up to the privacy guarantees outlined in the white paper. There is no such thing as perfect privacy and there never will be. Each of the layers you mentioned has different tradeoffs and can be used in combination to achieve pretty good privacy. For most people (99%) lightning is good enough. I mean seriously - the whole world operates based on bank accounts where your full balance, transaction history, name, address, birthday, and social security number is known by your custodian. The biggest problem with that is that you have a custodian in the first place, but all of those other privacy issues are already greatly improved with Bitcoin. The biggest risk most Bitcoiners face is spending from big UTXOs to people you know IRL who might come for your stack. A small custodial lightning wallet or a single lightning channel eliminates that risk. I can't think of a single transaction that I make where I'd benefit from having Moneros privacy model over Bitcoins economic model.

Saying Bitcoin was never about privacy is a good joke thank you ^^