On the other hand, I could imagine their business messaging ambitions to be threatened by third-party clients: There's nothing stopping the vendors of these clients from undercutting Meta on business messaging rates.
And this is all assuming that third-party services couldn't provide their own business messaging services to first-party WhatsApp client users without paying Meta their list price. I don't know whether the DMA allows that, or if normal rates would still apply in that case.
The data is otherwise E2E encrypted but when you see a link preview on WhatsApp Meta knows that.
Because no one else can answer your questions.
At least on my Mac, I also only see connections to the URL domain, nothing to a Facebook subdomain.
I don’t work at Facebook on this specific system that handles link previews so I have no idea of the details.
The fact is that if they send a request containing the link I previewed which is tied to my IP which connects to my Facebook account then they can 100% correlate that information and figure it out.
Are they doing that? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t work there. But they can if they want to so it all comes down to trust. Do you trust Meta?
Also a lot of the data you mentioned will also not be available if you don’t use their client, eg: if you use Signal client then Facebook won’t get your location all as that’s not part of regular text message
WhatsApp makes their money from the business clients/apps (which aren't covered under this, which I think is fine by the way).
So why care where a user is on the planet? I just don't see the business reason for this. Maybe I'm missing something?