I don't agree with you. so far Signal is the most mature and feature-rich messenger of the rest. yes, it provides privacy, not anonymity. but all new people are used to the algorithm of adding people, unlike SimpleX, Matrix, etc.

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Phone numbers harm anonymity, not privacy.

third incident

Not third but another one out of many. Incidents that don't really mean the app is not secure.

You can see from the article that Telegram would have to give up on a basic feature expected from similar apps in order to fix that "issue" with public groups.

Again, it's the public communication features that lead to such issues, and I expect any other app to have very same "issues" if they introduce similar features and make them useful enough for protesters to try to rely on them when fighting against oppressive governments.

You can't expect messengers like these to be a proper instrument for protesters that makes them safe. These public groups need to grow to become effective, and apps specifically aimed for protesters would not have enough user base. Still, Telegram is the most used app by protesters from what I see, and it does provide adequate level of protection if you use it correctly (if you understand how it works).

Signal pushes back against third party apps

So it doesn't like to be open enough for others to do what they want with it. Still, one shouldn't expect it to work anyway. If you make your client open source, there will be forks that allow communicating with your servers. You'd have to introduce a black box, and open source community won't like that.

Signal seems to do quite enough of useless stuff. People rate it more secure than Telegram. One of reasons for that is that it supports e2e encryption in group chats. But it's useless when comparing to all the issues with Telegram, already because it's always about public groups. Let me see how Signal would protect people in such groups while staying in scope of private communication app.

can pressure a CEO into simply handing over previously accrued user data, then the app was never secure to begin with

Nah, actually: "if a public service uses servers, then it is never secure". Any service will handle all the data they have if pressured. Servers have to know your IP address (though you can always use proxies) and phone number at least to provide service at all. You can't really blame owners of public service. You could blame them if their service was serverless though, because that would mean they store something they shouldn't need to operate.

Criticism of Telegram isn’t endorsement for Signal. They are both garbage in different ways.

Well it still does by default. You must enable the cloud password by yourself.

Too radical a solution for me, I used microG for a long time, but the notification problems made me go back to Google services. i've banned them from accessing camera/microphone/geolocation via App Ops (put them on ignore mode), so I'm pretty calm. but notifications are still a problem).

definetly bruh situation

I've been using microG for about a year, but there have been problems here and there with games and apps. and accordingly, I realize how many apps need Google services (especially notifications). so for now, through Root rights and App Ops, I've just restricted Google services access to the camera/microphone etc. this is an acceptable compromise for me.