Then why don’t they do end-to-end encryption by default instead of making it a dark pattern where you have to specifically opt-in to it as a separate chat group?

Pavel Durov was arrested in August 2024 in France for, among other things, providing encrypted services to criminals

IIRC this had way more to do with the Palestine Resistance network using Telegram than with criminals

I moved from telegram to signal to hosting my own matrix instance and connecting through a VPN. My assumption is that any remote server is compromised