I actually got almost half of my colleagues to use Signal. Well maybe they probably still use another chat app even when talking to a fellow colleague who has Signal, but at least I got them to register an account.

I fail to see any reason for hating a chat app so passionately except possibly for privacy concerns, which is definitely not the case here.

Try https://github.com/osfans/trime. It has multiple input schemas (i.e. pinyin, zhuyin, cangjie, etc.) to choose from, and they are great for typing Chinese. Admittedly it only supports the C in CJK, but it is absolutely worth a try if you don’t need Japanese or Korean.

Try Thumb-Key. It’s a keyboard made by Lemmy’s main developer. It uses a rather exotic layout, but once you get used to it, it is so much better than qwerty.