The question is not clear. To receive Bitcoin, all you need is your wallet address, which you will send to whoever is sending you the Bitcoin. Every other information apart from your wallet address is your sensitive information that you should keep within yourself and never disclose to anyone. Of course, your wallet address can be public, and that will not be an issue.

But honestly speaking, in the eyes of many, there is nothing much different from the public key and wallet address, as I have seen even some platforms mistake both, like when I came across a form where one was required to either put their public key or their wallet address for receiving payment.
 
It's hard for me to differentiate between them most of the time unless you, as someone with technical knowledge, are able to tell the difference between them, which brings me to the question: how can I differentiate between a wallet address and a public key?

P2PK (Pay to public key) transactions were common in the early days of bitcoin.
These days, it's not common to pay bitcoin to a pubic key. If someone wants to send you bitcoin, give him/her your address.


Your bitcoin address is derived from your public key.

A public keys starts with 02 or 03, if it's compressed and with 04, if it's uncompressed.
A bitcoin address starts with 1, 3 or bc1.


xpub is the term used for master public key.

OP is probably talking about individual public keys. A public key includes 66 or 130 characters.


Technically speaking, it's possible to pay bitcoin to public key, but as I said, that's not common these days.

From the title of your post asking if it's: better to send BTC to Wallet address or to my Public Key?

The wallet address serve as a destination route for the transaction of  your crypto.  They are gotten from your public key for the reception of funds.

.one of the usefulness of the public key is that you can use it to create signature and sign transactions to prove ownership of wallet address where there is doubt.

So if I get you correctly, the better the right channel through which you can send BTC to your wallet is through your wallet address.

Currently, payment using a public key is possible, but almost no one does this. This is an outdated format for payment details. But previously such payment was common - “Pay to public key” or P2PK. Right now I don't even know of any Bitcoin wallets that would allow me to do this. And even if you manage to somehow send funds to a public key, this will become a big problem for the recipient of the funds. After all, almost no modern Bitcoin wallet explicitly operates with such functions. You know, there are currently 7 types of addresses in Bitcoin. P2PK is the most outdated of them. Even a legacy address is no longer used much due to high fees. The most used one now is native segwit (bc1...). There are also taprut addresses that have not yet become widespread.

Your wallet address is derived from its public key. I haven't tried sending Bitcoin to a public key. I searched about it and it seems there's a confusion, but it looks like it is indeed possible to transfer Bitcoin using a public key. (https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/83631/sent-btc-to-public-key-instead-of-my-address)

But what is the point? I think there's no difference at all. After all, your Bitcoin address came from your public key. And it's public. It isn't your private keys. But public keys are composed of more characters than your address so you better use addresses instead. And I also haven't experienced a Bitcoin wallet which has a box intended for public keys in case a user prefers to make transactions with it rather than an address.

I usually send bitcoins to bitcoin wallet addresses (Segwit, Native, Taproot) but I have no experience sending or receiving bitcoins to any public key addresses. But as far as I know I'm not sure if any public key can send bitcoins.

This is the procedure if you send Bitcoin using public key, I'm glad with many improvement by developers, we only need to copy public address to receive or send Bitcoin without need to make it more complicated.

If I were know Bitcoin at that time, I doubt if I will interested with Bitcoin since as an Average Joe, it's really like an alien numbers.

I think the wallet address is what we use in receiving the fund which is our bitcoin address and this is how a lay man understand it, but technically, the public key is what constitutes the wallet receiving address, I've not seen anyone using the public key to receive bitcoin before even though it is the basic foundation to how the address where being generated, the coin itself is on the blockchain, every other keys are to help us decode the way our bitcoin was endoded on the blockchain in other to show our ownership.

No, you can't give this public key to anyone because most of the exchanges and wallets like Electrum don't recognize this when sending a BTC to a public key already tried it on my mobile phone but on desktop Electrum the public key it works but I don't know if you will receive it once you broadcast the transaction.
 
I don't know other wallets if there are still Bitcoin wallets that can able to recognize public keys to send BTC. To make sure you will receive BTC in your wallet always provide only BTC wallet address as we mentioned above.