I'm a U.S. iPhone user on many "green bubble" (standards-based) group chats, as are my wife and kids. I don't think we're outliers in this respect. If you're getting pushback on this, consider that this may say more about your social circle.
My dad does this to me all the time. For those that don't know, the videos we receive are 320x240p. Talk about potato... No matter how many times I tell him, he still does it. It's quite deliberate from Apple. For example, I have a video that I received which is 0.1MP (262kb) but an image I received that is 1536x2048 or 3.1MP (548kb). Why are my images double the size of the videos? I find it hard to buy an argument about bandwidth when doubling the video size would make it substantially more visible (though still quite annoying). I can't think of how this is anything but deliberate. Even if it isn't, clearly it's going to be taken that way.
So you send links, or use use alternatives like Discord, Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.
It can’t be the multi-trillion-dollar company that’s terrible, it must always be the people in your life.
Maybe, just maybe, technology should serve the user by enabling people to socialize with whom they wish, rather than the opposite.
So for example, we have Ecosystem A and Ecosystem B, each led by a company. Their users (note: NOT those companies) want an enhanced messaging standard between them. Who should be in charge of it? One of those two, or someone else? WHY would either company be incentivized to do so, since it hypothetically facilitates losing users to the other ecosystem? WHY would a third party come up with the best possible standard between these two (as well as maintaining it!) that they wouldn't then be compensated for?
So when you say "technology should serve the user", who or what "should" do this, and why "should" they do it? For free? You have to find or build the right incentives if you want something to be.
This is the same reason we are still grappling with a single medical records standard/exchange format. No one wants anyone else to be in charge of it, and yet someone must be, otherwise you have dilution of responsibility and perverse incentives.
This is the easiest one to solve, because it's not that expensive to make a decent messaging standard (Open Whisper Systems was very small, for example; solitary individuals have done it in other cases). It's not a matter of getting someone to do the work.
It's that messaging systems have a network effect, so when one comes as the default on a device with a billion users, it has a big network regardless of whether or not a competing protocol might be just as good. And then they want to lock competitors out of that network effect, which is an antitrust issue, and so here we are.
These systems could work together if Apple wanted them to. Google / Android isn't the part that is preventing interoperability. So ultimately it really is an iPhone being bad problem. They've marketed the problem well to make it seem like it is the other way around in order to make iPhones more desirable.
It is nice that it works for you, but do not play stupid here. You know it's huge.