What bothered me was that Signal fanbase was trashing Telegram for not publishing the server source, while Signal was doing this.

We don’t know what anyones server code looks like. The code that is published may not be the one they are actually running.

In fact Signal stopped publishing server side code a few years back, and only resumed after the community got angry: https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/04/06/it-looks-like-signal-isnt-as-open-source-as-you-thought-it-was-anymore/

I find Telegram to be at least as trustworthy as Signal. Signal has a lot of red/orange flags that bother me. For example, Telegram is not based in the United States, whereas Signal is.

French government is trying to kill one of the few successful European tech companies.

It depends on how good your phones gps is. My phone (Fairphone 4) has a pretty good gps antenna, and the time it takes for a gps lock is very similar with or without google location services. I turned off google enhanced location a long time ago and never looked back.