"Or are there long-term plans to drop the critical reliance on phone numbers?"
Yes
https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-introducing-usern...
Yes
https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-introducing-usern...
1. group crypto can't give away the identities 2. your identity system can't give away the actual people 3. your distribution system can't give away the locations of those people
It's a hard problem, nobody in the world has done it yet. Signal seem now to have some concrete thing for (1), by your link they are supposedly working on (2), but (3) is also needed.