Using Telegram when you are using a Tor based service alone is a pretty bad choice in my opinion... Even then, I thought Telegram always logged IPs since they store the IPs of logged in devices.

Telegram is probably one of the higher tier IM apps for normies, but I agree it is mostly used for scammy garbage. Signal is the best choice for normies you know IRL and there are way better than Telegram for literally anything else. I can give props to the UI since it's always been very smooth, but that's about it.