I am fully bought into the Apple ecosystem. Not sure yet if I regret it. It is annoying to be so tied down to one company that isn’t going the way I want it to.
There are current workarounds, like isn’t your home Mac as a relay, but nothing super elegant that I know of
this means that i either use ios or i have to be "that guy" always asking everyone to send something in a different format or to please move the conversation to some other app - no one wants to be that guy - apple's got us right where they want us
and to be honest, when texting other people, it makes a huge difference, believe it or not, if your chat bubbles on their screen are blue vs green. it shouldn't matter - people who would care about this aren't people you would want to talk to anyway blah blah - that's all fun and great but it does matter, unfortunately
IMO it’s better than Signal as far as UX goes with enough privacy to be practically for everyday chat. I actively avoid WhatsApp because Facebook. They recently changed their privacy policy to no one’s surprise.