To be fair, the ad-free honeymoon that you were living in was obviously not a feasible steady state. Your messaging experience was being sponsored by VCs in the expectation of selling you to someone, in this case facebook
No, wait, most people on this forum could knock up a messaging app in a couple of days and run it on aws lambda for less than pennies per user per year.
https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/
I'm being snarky but I really don't get your point, nothing about this is expensive or difficult. Signal case in point:
Times 1.5 billion users is at least $30m / year, where to get that?