Many of these articles seem to gloss over the fact that bitcoin is the currency of choice for darknet-type transactions.
> Bitcoin allows you to make transactions online when Visa does not.
but conveniently leave out the people that care about that the most. Most criminals can not safely engage with banking systems or money transfer services. Bitcoin functions roughly as both of those. darknet markets are what originally gave bitcoin value, and they are the reason it won't go to zero (unless another cryptocurrency eclipses it)
Re: darknetmarkets, many have moved on to other more privacy focussed coins, but they were a valuable use case for bitcoin.