Email, docs, music, maps etc have reasonable alternatives and you don’t depend on others to switch (a gmail user will receive my email from tuta). But with WhatsApp either you conceal and use it or you just don’t talk to people (tried convincing them to switch to signal and it simply doesn’t happen)
How do you deal with it?
There are no advantages for WhatsApp, it just happened to exist before Signal. The only selling point is the user lock in. WhatsApp could show a 30 second ad for every sent message and let an AI crawl all your chats and it would stay the most used messenger in countries where it currently is.
People don’t use WhatsApp because they like it so much, but because not using it means loosing friends and excludes from hobbies.
South Park on point as always: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fGKR1Z1lRik
The advantage is comfort and numbness. Even if it is considered to be a negative advantage by any tech savvy mind - or any other reasonable and logical person. My point is to not whine around like OP. Either use it and get fucked or don’t use it and have a good life.