I mean... They disabled desktop registration, then disabled registration from any non-official client, then can randomly ban people who try to make their usage of the platform more private/anonymous... Then there is censorship, at least here. And I have heard of at least one case of cooperation with German LE, so it's not "untouchable" for Westerners too.

It was never safe with such an approach of "I can close my eyes and pretend the law doesn't apply to me" even in the West. If it was hostile to privacy and anonymity by design, it was a matter of time until it became wide open to Western LE too. The sheer amount of compromate it had on users was a ticking time bomb.

"Highly decentralized complexity" - what does that even apply to? That would apply to Matrix, XMPP, Simplex, especially Briar. Even Signal can technically be selfhosted (whether it is feasible is another question), in Telegram you can't have even that because the server is closed.