I've been waiting for average users to catch up since about 2010 when I was running Pidgin (XMPP) on my Android, since SMS is terribly unreliable.
SMS is a best-effort protocol, with zero error checking, meaning no error correction, no ensured delivery. It's known to lose up to ten percent of messages.
It's also tightly bound to cellular architecture, since it encapsulates messages into the mostly-empty management frames of the cell network.
It was bleeding edge in 1986 (IIRC), but it's long past it's retirement time.
Apple did it with iMessage so they can harvest data.
Google saw that and is now pushing for RCS to completely replace SMS because then they can harvest the data and sell ads and spam you ads with RCS and worse, they would control its backend so they would gatekeep everything about it.
They actually went so far as to forcibly enable RCS on my phone. While for now I can still disable it, I need to find an alternative to the default message app on android.
I had to check mine after your comment. They did it to me too. Every time they asked to turn it on I was adamant to refuse it. Has caused issues with messages not being sent or received before. With email that's fine but messages are meant to be instant.