Only reading about video driver issues and sleep/hibernation configuration puts me off Linux desktop. Windows is a great and modern user-friendly OS. Office 365 is awesome too. WSL is the latest missing piece.
Passion of his employees is very well observable from garbage quality products they make: trashy APIs, utter trash SDKs, broken endpoints, outages, broken user stories.
Amazon also treats its employees like shit but at least their products are usable.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Telemetry in this case helps in improvement of the product, it's good for you as end user. If you don't like, please switch to another editor. You paid zero but setting requirements how it should and how it shouldn't. Good luck with utter ugly but no tracking and "free" GNU Emacs with its ancient Lisp and garbage packages.
What's the practical function of MVP in the era of GitHub and open source where everyone can join discussion with devs and PMs without a need to be part of any elitist group?
Just to keep a handful of folks still proud of their MVP badges they earned in 2001?
If you are a journalist reporting from a repressive county and living in danger - better use Signal/Tor/PGP. But if you an average human who just wants to share family photos or discuss work stuff and keep the data in privacy, out of Google/Facebook, advertisement agencies and court orders - then Telegram is much more pleasant messenger to use.
Signal is a messenger for sequrity enthusiasts, Telegram is a privacy-respecting messenger for average user.
Quality of Signal apps is not that good in comparison, Telegram is just much, much better for everyday use.
It has native (not Electron) open-source clients for all popular platforms, tons of features and stickers (valuable for average people) and conveniently synchronises between devices.
It does not have goal of monetization, but respects privacy of users and does not cooperate with governments. Has anti-blocking mechanisms built-in.
Based on past actions of Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, there are no much reasons to not trust in integrity if his intentions so far.