It sounds like you are saying this project's true motivating objective is to advance the author's personal beliefs about "UX" and to see wide adoption of this philosophy as embodied in some particular software. That he chose to use a large, politically-connected, centralized social media^W^W ad sales company as a distribution channel ensuring wide adoption by default. And that the author would make any trade-off in order to see wide adoption.

Should we be surprised?

If I am not mistaken the crytography here is compliments of djb. (Best "UX" designer ever, IMHO.)

The Signal author's contribution is only a protocol and some "UX". His programming language of choice was Java.