In my experience, I think people take cultural differences very personally for no real particular reason. The same thing happens whenever any kind of news about iMessage appears.

You get the same comments of “this is only an American problem!“ Or “the rest of the world uses WhatsApp“

It doesn’t occur to people that the rest of the world can use whatever they want. Different countries have different trends, different cultures, different styles - different everything. South Korea uses Kakao talk, Japan uses Line. A lot of countries use Telegram for example.

We just don’t use WhatsApp here lol. And stupid as the SIM locking policy is here, it’s just not a common issue for us in the USA.