Signal is still a significant improvement in security and privacy over SMS, Telegram, Discord, X, Whatsapp... It achieved the level of privacy that solutions like PGP tried and mostly failed to achieve for decades. Being tied to a phone number was part of the convenience of their solution. Allowing for nicknames now, might improve on the metadata leakage problem slightly.

I'm sure reactionists will immediately drop Signal because Elon the great said they should without considering that it still might be their best solution to communicate privately with their friends and family. But X makes *all* of it's money from collecting a lot more than metadata from their users, Tesla collects driving data and metadata from all of its customers, Grok trains it's AI on all of the data collected from X, Tesla and other sources without asking if users want to opt out of those training datasets. So I'm not sure Elon has a leg to stand on in this conversation.