Let me set a few things straight: Telegram is for the most part tiktok for people that don't mind putting some effort into reading on a few odd occasions. Saying that I have a lot of Ukrainian friends would be an understatement and the are the only reason I have telegram-all of them favor it, which, all things considered, is a grave mistake. In practice, telegram is far more closely related to tiktok and twitter than a messaging app and by extension it is heavily used to spread misinformation: telegram channels are ultimately under the complete control of their admins and they have the ultimate authority with no way of doing anything about it. Twitter was forced to put some effort into it through community notes but that hasn't even made a dent: it literally takes two google searches to find tens of thousands of bot accounts spreading misinformation. In that regard, telegram is much worse since it's an infinite source of cognitive dissonance: People are willfully joining echo chambers, which are openly advertised as such.
I am really glad that telegram is nowhere nearly as big in western countries compared to eastern Europe. It pains me to say this but, but even till this day, us eastern Europeans are way more susceptible to propaganda than the western world, although, for a million and one reasons that seems to have a huge effect on the western world as well. In that sense, telegram is an active contributor.
10/10 times I'll sit firmly behind Signal, despite the many shortcomings: there is no developer integration, if you want to create a signal account for your own personal bots or whatever, you can but only through a hacky repo that's on github.
Yes, the people behind telegram know all this very well and they don't like the fact that people who are aware of it as well are favoring signal infinitely more than telegram.