We recommended alternatives back in 2019 when we published this article originally. Unfortunately, people then started to discuss why all of these alternatives were much worse according to them, distracting attention away from XMPP's downsides.
Indeed. One should mention upsides and downsides of a solution. In our opinion, many "use XMPP" comments only focus on the upsides but rarely mention any downsides. This is the primary reason for our article on some (not all) downsides of XMPP. We focus on easy-to-verify findings. However, we (and others) can't write an exhaustive list of pros and cons of all messengers.
> Were those arguments valid? Most of them drew attention to unrelated features. E.g., "Y requires your phone number; thus, users of Y can easily be tracked"; however, the situation isn't binary, and phone numbers weren't in our article in the first place.