But how can you be sure there's no additional code being run on their server?
This is the huge advantage that Signal has over mail, the default mode in Telegram and pretty much anything there is: it does matter if NSA, FSB, MI5, Mossad, Google and Facebook all have root on a server that all the traffic passes through. To the best our knowledge - long as they don't compromise one of the endpoints - the only thing they'll get is metadata and the only thing they can do is disrupting the service.