It is a notification summary.
There is a large number of people out there who receive hundreds of notifications (willingly but mostly unwillingly) daily from apps they have installed (not just messengers), and nearly all of them can't cope with the flood of the notifications. Most give up on tending to the notifications altogether, but some resort to the notification summaries which alleviate the cognitive overload («oh, it is a picture of a dog that I will check out when I get a chance to, and not a pic of significant other who got themselves into a car accident»).
The solution is, of course, to not allow all random apps to spam the user with the notifications, but that is not how laypeople use their phones.
Even the more legit apps (e.g. IG) dump complete garbage upon unsuspecting users throughout the day («we thought you would love this piece of trash because somebody paid us»).