Yes, how the amounts paid are kept anonymous is particularily interesting: https://people.xiph.org/~greg/confidential_values.txt

The involved parties are kept anonymous by enforced mixing, I think.

This link is confusing because it describes the proposal to add "Confidential Transactions" to Bitcoin. Some concepts are related/similar to Monero's but it's not the same.

Maybe you could point us to a similar (succinct) description of the involved cryptography? This one e.g. https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1098.pdf ?

To some extent, yes. Ring signatures effectively make transactions more difficult to trace. Large exchanges of value will likely be much easier to trace given their rarity over time.

Values can't be known, after the RingCT hard fork. See: https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0005.pdf