WhatsApp as a service is pretty good. I can have great quality video chat with people on the other side of the world for free.

When I was a kid this was not possible / very expensive.

(Of course personally I prefer more privacy focused options like Signal, but still)

WhatsApp was already great before Facebook bought it. Though they did switch it to the Signal protocol for E2E encryption, which was great. Nowadays, it's still pretty useful. The AI button is annoying. There were some kerfuffles about linking WhatsApp data to Facebook/Insta data, which they promised to (I think the EU) not to do when they acquired WhatsApp, but did it anyway [1].

For the rest of Meta, just read Careless People and the linked submission is not surprising at all.

[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/whatsapp-says...

They bought it, they did not created it.