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The lack of a clear business model does make me hesitate in building anything substantial on it.

Supposedly Telegram has been profitable since 2024 but there's crypto stuff mixed in there so it's hard to know how stable that is.

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The have a massive advertising business, and charge for premium accounts. Not sure what makes you doubt them when other platforms, like Signal, have zero business model and are just providing services "out of the goodness of their heart" (not suspicious at all).

I want to understand the business model behind this specific feature.

Probably doesn't cost much at all to run some servers to spin up javascript functions, compared to their massive storage costs. It's at best a fraction of a percent of total costs.

Whether or not they (or discord for that matter) can sustain a profitable business in the long term is another question.

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