I don’t know why people stuck with it. I’ve used it; I get that a lot of the initial success/hype was:

• It’s not owned by Meta
• "Putin hates Durov!"
• “Unlimited” storage (lots of people using it as free cloud storage, which is dumb if you value your files)

But your messages are not E2EE by default (only “Secret Chats”, which aren’t synced across devices)…Telegram (the organization) could always read your messages. I said this so many times and got called everything under the sun.

“Why would they care about my messages though?” ------> Because $300 Million.