This is the rsync v Dropbox of messaging applications.
Yes, unencrypted social features that could just as easily be serviced by any other social networking app which hasn't been explicitly banned yet (and that could happen to Telegram at any time).
> It's that Telegram operates under harsher network conditions.
So their operators claim. But it's not clear why that would be true and I haven't seen any numbers to demonstrate it either. Have you?
Telegram had to survive Russia's attempt to ban it, so it evolved a number of strategies: using push notifications to deliver IP-adresses of not-yet-blocked servers, using socks-proxies, the evolution of the MTProto Proxy encrypted protocol, and finally resorting to steganography to mimic ordinary https traffic, thus evading the DPI.
The attempts of the state censorship agency to block the telegram servers were hilarious to watch: at one point they had 0.5% of the IPv4 address space banned, and broke a lot of stuff (AWS, Google, DigitalOcean, OVH, etc). Telegram was still working, of course.
The IP-address delivery via push notification was a nice idea, if they'd only be on that level with their E2EE deployment.