I can’t say that I’m surprised when a privacy-focused company has a dose of unfounded or biased paranoia. For me, this is not reason enough to distrust them.
I also don’t fault them for doing away with SMS when most of the populated world had already moved away from SMS by then too. As a North American relying on SMS for about half of my messaging needs at the time, I wasn’t happy about it either. But I don’t fault them for making that decision, and ultimately it did push me to rely on more secure options, which I see as a good thing.
Same here, I use Silverblue as host OS on all of my workstations now, and Arch for nearly all of my containers.
Flatpak for just about everything in the userspace.