I think a lot of these points have been made better elsewhere.
The extended discussion of hypothetical US interference just because of a tenuous chain of connection to the CIA is just typical US-badism. The US frequently funds tools which they think further geopolitical goals and this doesn’t inherently mean its untrustworthy, just that their methodology of control is more resilient to uncensored speech; the best example of this is TOR, decentralized, anonymous, and created by Naval Research and DARPA. The author can’t concede this point as it’d bring up they’re unsubtly simping for a different colonial power, one who does require such censorship.
Signal’s centralized nature has always been a major criticism (and it’s reasonable), however as a trade off it’s easy to on-board the tech illiterate. It’s nontrivial to set up a Matrix server and I’ve seen the difficulty of migrating activist groups there. It’s good as a long term goal, but one also has to recognize that a person struggling with housing has different concerns and will prefer to use whatever their friends and family do.
Now when I’m lazy and don’t support some standards in my open source projects, I’m just going to say its for security.