My introduction to asymmetric cryptography had to do with protecting myself from the authorities while buying drugs on the internet.

One of its first applications anywhere was protecting anti nuclear protestors from government provocateurs.

We could prevent so much fraud of we could only convince the credit card companies to start using it (instead of printing a symmetric secret on the outside of the card).

It's predominantly a force for good. If anything, its a bit anarchical.

What you're noticing is not the leading edge of set of harms brought about by asymmetric cryptography, but rather the late stage of adoption where the bad guys realize that their enemy's sword has had two edges all this time. Every technology that mediates an adversarial relationship goes through this eventually.

With the printing press came temporary freedom followed by intellectual property. So too with radios and the FCC. So too with social media. It's useless to blame the technology. Blame the people.

My point is that as far as I understand (not a cryptography expert) once you have the mathematical concept of asymmetric cryptography you also have the mathematical concept of a certificate, so you can't have one without the other.