I am not sure what you mean by "Western messengers" exactly. If it's Whatsapp, then I don't think it's any better than Telegram, even though Whatsapp claims to provide E2EE. The entire stack is closed source, and in any case it leaks huge amounts of metadata.

And no, Signal is not inferior. If you are really concerned about the phone number issue, use a burner eSIM or purchase a Signal account. Last time I checked though, payment was tied to Apple/Google, inexplicably.