In the TNG episode Lonely Among Us, while under the influence of an alien entity, Picard disintegrates himself into a nebula. The crew spend hours trying to get him back and are about to give up, when Troi senses Picard's disembodied presence nearby, and they are able to reconstitute his body from the transporter buffer, reuniting it with his mental energy.

So Star Trek has effectively confirmed the scientific existence of the soul, and the fact that it exists independently of the body, and that the soul can continue to exist without the body, and that the transporter can transport the soul without destroying it. So, no, the transporter is not a suicide machine.

Star Trek transporters imply a lot of stuff, many of them contradictory.

bro could have stopped at one copy and taken turns bowing like his nemisis did, but chose to die instead

Conciousness, what makes you, you, is not your brain functions. A "braindead" person usually still has a functioning part of the brain that regulates heartbeat. But the parts that are required for conciousness are gone.

The point behind the sleep analogy isn't that everything shuts down as in death, but your conciousness shuts down. It's more like a computer that has suspended it's processes to disk (aka hibernated) but then went into low-power mode instead of powering off completely. You can wake it back up and it restart these processes. You could even buy a new computer identical to the old one, copy the hard drive over bit by bit and have the new computer launch all the old processes. Are they then the same processes or different ones? A calculation that was suspended will pick up where it left of after all.

oh sorry I though it had a watermark https://www.existentialcomics.com/comic/1

my personal opinion is that instant (i.e. arbitrarily close to speed of light) teleportation machines could be built in theory, but doing so is really expensive and there's just no economical reason to do so.

for example, for fast travel, we already have aircraft and rockets. Yet nobody would use them to ship objects produced in china to europe, e.g. cars, if there's no time-critical component (i.e. food that spoils very quickly etc.). So the fastest way of travel is typically also the most expensive one, while cheaper modes of transport take more time.

Then, you can think of a teleportation device as a mode of transport where the speed approaches the speed of light. If our previous experience is anything to go by, that means that the cost of transport would increase enormously, and thus practically nobody would use it anyways. So that's the practical side to this thing.

Ok, then explain Thomas Riker

So teleportation is like going into the woodchipper feet first? Ok, now I slowly understand McCoys problems with that invention.

The crimes of Theseus

The Prestige is a movie where Wolverine and Batman fight in a battle of who is the best magician. David Bowie makes a teleportation machine for Logan to teleport across the entire theater to the shock of the audience.