I guess group chat would be fine if all your friends are friends of each other. High School and college ages maybe, but as an older adult, I have so many different groups of people that I interact with that it would be obnoxious to deal with. I also find that there are certain people in group chats who are lonely and spam crap.

You can have many group chats though?

I do that in Signal, I have group chats with different circles of friends ,and we also regularly create short-lived purpose-built chats for events or other things...

It's a bit more friction perhaps but in the end it works well and we've been doing it for years.