> and I haven’t found anything lacking in the latter, UX wise

I'm sorry if I'll sound condescending, but you probably don't use either frequently enough. With telegram it's the little (and sometimes not so little) things, e.g.:

  - voice message transcription
  - you can select part of the message via long-press and use it as a quote when responding
  - massively more complex formatting possible
  - bots as the first class citizens not gated behind some bullshit 'Business' KYC/subscription
  - is not crippled by prohibiting system-level phonebook access like whatsapp
  - extreme flexibility in managing large groups, mostly due to the bot point above
  - and many more

I use them daily, so we might just have different priorities.

Bot access is definitely better in Telegram; that’s what I sometimes use it for.

WhatsApp has voice message transcription now, but fortunately I don’t receive many. (I consider it pretty rude to put the effort of messaging on the recipient because the sender can’t be bothered to type or transcribe on their side.)

Everything else you mentioned is a minor inconvenience to me. Knowing the provider can’t mine my message data more than makes up for that.