I mean one of their highest rituals involved stomping on a crown and a pope's mitre, meant to symbolize the rejection of oppressive systems. So yeah, they were anti-monarchical and had a lot of connections to republican revolutions (french, american, etc.).

And much as that might seem like a trite gesture these days, back then it was accounted treason and could get you beheaded. A lot of these people had respectable professions and public lives, so it was important to protect their secrecy.

That being said, it never really went extinct. I mean it's far from the global cabal of elites who secretly rule the world that conspiracy nutjobs say it is. It's more like the Lion's Club for esotericists at this point. But most of them don't even care about the esotericism aspects of it anymore, they just do it like their pappy and grandpappy did before them. It doesn't mean much these days outside of that.

That being said, there clearly is a secret cabal of pedophile billionaires, but there's no credible reason to believe it's connected in any way with the illuminati. More likely, the Qanon cult that accused the illuminati of that stuff was actually projecting the whole time and it's really the deepest inner circle of Qanon and adjacent groups that are guilty. See Epstein & Associates, DJT, Ghislaine's father, etc...

So much of the Qanon propaganda goes straight back to Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels, if you backtrace the ideas they contain. Like "cryptojew," "jewification," etc... QAnon were literally neonazis, and they gave us trump. And when you see the connection from Qanon → Epstein → Mossad, suddenly what's happening in Gaza starts to make sense in a horrific sort of way.

Somehow, after the ratline and operations paperclip and ossavakim, a few early decades of nazi hunting somehow turned into the Likud basically becoming nazis and taking over the knesset. It certainly seems to turn nazi-era propaganda into a torment nexus, giving antisemites a (flimsy) excuse for their hatred, and didn't Bibi need to change his own name just to sound more jewish?