Hope you have more luck, Viber is extremely annoying with their notifications and ads and almost everyone here still uses it. Can't get away from it but at least it's not whatsapp I guess...
Telegram is great. Pioneers of chat apps, honestly. They have every feature first, and no matter how many they add, their app seems to never become a bloated piece of shit.
I've recently switched from Telegram to RCS, but I used Telegram for nearly a decade.
It was, but they were delaying the free period. Right before it was bought I remember they started to stop extending them, so some users had to pay. I know some people that paid, it wasn't much money.