It's also the case doing that securely required pushing the boundaries of modern cryptographic protocols. Telegram's protocol graphs are novices' doodles compared to Signal's group encryption stuff formally described here: https://signal.org/blog/pdfs/signal_private_group_system.pdf

On the other hand Signal has made a lot of questionable choices (such as adding a crypto payment that was just a money grab) that it has made me lost trust in the team and their motives. I no longer trust their build images and even if you build your own you have no idea what software the person you're talking to is running.

Sure, you do you. Personally I haven't seen anyone in e.g. the major infosec expert bubble abandon Signal for introducing mobilecoin. It's an opt-in feature, it doesn't make the message side security code harder to audit, and it's not like Moxie isn't painstakingly engineering everything to be secure from the get-go. I haven't once been disappointed in a new feature. OTOH consider Telegram that adds group video calls that nobody asked for: is it E2EE? Nope. Another security disparity to make explaining and understanding its security even more nightmarish.

Doesn't matter if signal is secure if nobody uses it. None of my friends are willing to use it because of the lack of features and horrible ui/ux.