Commodore is back with a de-Googled feature phone for the anti-doomscrolling crowd
(www.androidcentral.com)
I don't use it, but unfortunately Whatsapp is the de-facto messaging app for a very large percentage of the world population (especially outside of the US) and so the trade-off people are stuck in is use Whatsapp or be cut off from friends/family/anyone else who doesn't care about Zuck peeping their DMs (aka, the vast majority of people).