What’s the major difference between adresss and public key?

[Charles-Tim]

Bitcoin public addresses are shortened versions of Bitcoin public keys which are longer.
List of Bitcoin address prefixes.
Bitcoin address types explained: 1, 3, bc1p, bc1q.

Because public key can be used to receive coins just like addresses? With the way things have been, public key is not the shortened version of bitcoin public keys.

Addresses are safe against quantum computers.
Multisig P2WSH is having 62 characters which is just 4 characters lesser than the public keys
Silent payment addresses are 116.

[Mia Chloe]

~snip

Even if there were actually wallets back in the day that received via public keys, I doubt any still do as of today. It basically defies the whole essence of consolidations and change addresses in order to mask your transaction paths. Public key venerability to quantum computing is still not fully practical actually.

As for silent payment addresses they are actually the safest of the three.  Only thing is it's not as common as regular SEGWIT yet plus even taproot isn't that popular yet too.

[Cricktor]

Even if there were actually wallets back in the day that received via public keys, I doubt any still do as of today.

To my knowledge all versions of Bitcoin Core and its predecessors (before the name change) had never issues with P2PK transactions, i.e. sending or receiving to a public key. Bitcoin Core's combo() descriptor "sees" all four major address formats (P2PK, P2PKH, P2WPKH and P2SH-P2WPKH), except Taproot.

It basically defies the whole essence of consolidations and change addresses in order to mask your transaction paths.

I don't understand why using one of the simplest unlocking scripts involving a public key has anything to do with consolidations and change addresses. They maybe are less accessible because they aren't quite the default "address format".

Public key venerability to quantum computing is still not fully practical actually.

Honestly, QCs are still far far away to even be remotely a threat to attack public keys efficiently with Shor's algorithm on the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP). We will have to see, how long it will take the QC hype to actually produce something that can solve serious "real world problems" or become a viable threat to Bitcoin security and other cryptographic usage in common internet space.

The disadvantage of P2PK is indeed that a receiving public key is immediately exposed to the sender and on the blockchain's public transaction. Sending coins always exposes the public key to my knowledge (I need to dig much deeper into Taproot though).