How come, signal works exactly the same as whatsapp. I forced my friends and (older) relatives to change to signal and there has been no problems and everyone is happy.
I see no reason to back-up my history ever. I don't use signal for anything that needs to be archived. Nor do any of my friends. One of the selling points of signal is the feature that it doesn't automatically save photos, this is a good feature. You manually save the photos you want to save.
And I thought people regularly backed up everything worth saving from phones to non phone archive anyway.
This does not prevent anything. I've had to deal with this with corporate phones from old employees. I can take the phone to any of the nearest phone repair shops and they can remove all google protections after factory reset for less than 20eur per phone.