Maybe a dumb question, why do people even want to backup their chats to the cloud? imho I think people just emotionally default to and get obsessed about backing up everything and never losing anything. But do you really need your texts backed up to the cloud? Are you ever really going to your cloud backups and reading them? Encryption and privacy totally aside, this seems silly to me. If you have data or info you need to save you absolutely should be putting it somewhere else besides a messaging app. If I need a secure backup I'm usually putting it in Bitwarden(encrypted and open source).

That being said I try to avoid WhatsApp in favor of Signal regardless. However when you have mixed iphone and android friend or family groups, especially in different countries, you often have to default to WhatsApp. Its just the most common messaging app by far. And because lots of people I know think Signal is only for drug dealers and criminals (the same mindset they apply to bitcoin interestingly enough).