I worked for a company that tried to require wechat. I refused. Never got any flak, but missed a lot of comms from the first gen Chinese immigrants in the company.

I posit they use WeChat more than just to censor/spy in wechat, but rather more as an one of a set of apps that can be used to side-channel leak data about the phone/user. (Israel is also the other giant player in this arena). I don't understand any tech-savy privacy conscious person being ok with it, other than being one of those who has completely given up on privacy.

There is a reason the military banned tiktok, for example. (and it's not just because I've never seen a user on tiktok not look like total base-dumbass)