That “lot of people” probably represent less than 1% of the population. “Normal” people don’t use alternatives to SMS because they’re more secure, they used them because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to communicate with their friends.
You’re on a platform where the privacy and open source crowd has a big stronghold, normies don’t give a crap about that.
Heck, I’m very tech literate and the only reason I’ve got an alternative installed on my phone is because I’ve got two friends with whom it’s become a meme that we use anything but SMS, everything else I do via SMS/MMS/RCS.
1% if the population is a lot of people, and encryption is becoming more and more important to “normal” people, otherwise WhatsApp etc. wouldn’t be making such a big deal about it as a feature.
If you’re using WhatsApp only because you need to pay for SMS or all your friends who have to pay for SMS use it, is privacy such a big deal to you?
The only reason I ever had it installed was because I became friends with people from other countries that had to pay for SMS when we didn’t, they would have otherwise used SMS because it’s a no brainer to just use the tech that doesn’t require data and that’s available by default.