Is there anything a person can do about it, other than using Firefox and degoogling?

Each chat on telegram holds a history of shared media, which is separated into tabs for media (pictures and videos), files (any other files, including uncompressed images), links (every shared link, probably the most useful one), music and so on.

It’s really handy if you remember you’ve sent someone a link to an article and don’t want to scroll through 5 months of messages.

Sadly I’m in the same boat. I’ve been trying to switch to Matrix, but telegram is so much better in terms of features. I really miss the shared media and links functionality.

This is what I use as well. As it does not come with any cloud storage (a feature imo) I sync it with syncthing - another great foss, privacy-friendly project.