I am not sure what you mean by "Western messengers" exactly. If it's Whatsapp, then I don't think it's any better than Telegram, even though Whatsapp claims to provide E2EE. The entire stack is closed source, and in any case it leaks huge amounts of metadata.

And no, Signal is not inferior. If you are really concerned about the phone number issue, use a burner eSIM or purchase a Signal account. Last time I checked though, payment was tied to Apple/Google, inexplicably.

You can pay money to register without a phone number https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/11197884108826-...

> What Western genius thought of such a feature, displaying a phone number in a group chat?

Well, most of those apps try to inject themselves in between you and the rest of the world, by "helpfully" offering to be your SMS handler and phone call replacement.

No thanks.