And the journalist who gets paid to write a nice article about Signal will surely get a quote from the protestor who happened to use Signal and not Telegram.
Also Telegram was more-or-less resistant to at least not leak any personal information of their users in ex-USSR. So it's works well enough for protesters threat model.
Signal focuses on secure communication, Telegram has a secure communication feature... But also a social network of group chats and channels that link to each other; and that's the focus of this article.
The other use cases of Telegram could be serviced by other apps. There are plenty of non-E2E social networks available just like Telegram.
EDIT: Unfortunately postmodernbrute I am not able to reply to your comment. But I am not trying to deny that Telegram has caught a wave of popularity among Belarusians and others. What I am saying is that Telegram likely only has that trust because of puff pieces like this. It is not because of any technological superiority or unique feature that it provides (since it isn't/there aren't any).