It's ok to espouse your dislike for something but please do it correctly: "everything else" is not sent in plaintext. "Everything else" is encrypted to the server.

I don't think I said anything that was factually incorrect. If you read the Telegram FAQ they say that secret chats are end-to-end encrypted and regular chats are only client to server encrypted. That means the plain text of your messages is accessible to the server by default. Anyone with access to the servers including Telegram employees, governments, and cyber criminals can read your messages.

Hacker News for example is also client to server encrypted using TLS (as are most websites) but obviously our comments are still accessible in plain text.

https://telegram.org/faq#q-so-how-do-you-encrypt-data

You specifically wrote "sent in plaintext", which is factually incorrect. Telegram messages are never sent in plaintext.

But to address your digression: Cloud Chats (as opposed to E2EE Secret Chats) are both encrypted in transit and at rest [1]. The difference between the MTProto implementation between Cloud Chats and Secret Chats are, at a very high level, that part of the encryption key is held by Telegram.

To be unequivocally clear, at no point are Cloud Chat messages ever stored in plaintext or sent in plaintext.

[1] https://core.telegram.org/mtproto#authorization-and-encrypti...