Not all, but some will and that's good enough. Security and privacy is all about layers, not guaranteed solutions.
That said, if you have "business" with a company, they are probably using your registered home address to understand how to deal with your local laws/regulations. e.g. If you're using a registered google account and don't have an address in a state that offers protection, its very unlikely they'll extend any privacy policies to you just because your IP says you're in California, for example.
OTOH, if you don't have a registered address/account/profile and your IP is coming out of California, its possible some companies will apply stricter policies based on your preference.
To your original point though, yes, shady companies will continue to behave in unethical ways.
A lot of the cookie notifications can't collect data until you accept them (or follow their annoying "opt-out" workflow). If you install UBlock Origin and go to its settings > 'Filter lists' and enable the "EasyList - Cookie Notices" you can block a lot of cookies. If they can never nag you and you never opt in, assuming they're following the law, you shouldn't be tracked.
Samsung alone is ~25% of the global Android smartphone market share [0]. This means 1 in 4 Android users will send "SMS" messages via RCS. You're right, it's not actually default, but it may as well be considering the app has over 5 billion downloads [1] and over 800 million monthly active users (MAU) [2]. This makes Google's Messages app slightly more popular than Telegram with 700 million MAU [3]. It may be a recent change, but its already taking over some of the more popular apps in terms of usage and general availability.
RCS is is late to the game but it's caught up and only getting better.
Appreciate the comment. I would like to do that but RCS is basically the default "SMS" option on Android making it broadly available to nearly half my contacts, the onboarding is basically "text me", whereas I'd have to provide some sort of instruction if I wanted to onboard anyone onto XMPP, in addition to recommending a good client depending on what OS they're running.
I'm not saying it can't be private, but defaults matter and by default every message sent on Telegram (unless you opt into a "secure chat") is viewable by anyone with access to Telegrams infrastructure and you have no way to know your message history has been compromised.
In contrast, everything within Signal is completely private and end-to-end encrypted with no compromises. Your groups, group names, profile pictures, stickers, reaction, voice/video message etc are all private without anyone having to make do anything. Privacy is enforced, not an option.
Telegram does have secure chats, but - either intentionally or not - they have made them incredibly inconvenient to use as they are not enabled by default, don't work in group chats, and don't sync across your own devices.
So yes, Telegram is private, just as private as a PGP encrypted email.
there are exactly three messaging apps: Signal, Matrix/Element/SMS or RCS. anyone that wants to reach out has those options. I've had a lot of Signal converts.
deltachat uses autocrypt which apparently doesn't support key verification yet. how secure is it if you can't even verify that your messages aren't being intercepted? I also didn't see anything about rotating keys after every message like Signal does, so anyone sucking up your encrypted messages just needs one key to see your entire message history. that doesn't sound very good.
Not all, but some will and that's good enough. Security and privacy is all about layers, not guaranteed solutions.
That said, if you have "business" with a company, they are probably using your registered home address to understand how to deal with your local laws/regulations. e.g. If you're using a registered google account and don't have an address in a state that offers protection, its very unlikely they'll extend any privacy policies to you just because your IP says you're in California, for example.
OTOH, if you don't have a registered address/account/profile and your IP is coming out of California, its possible some companies will apply stricter policies based on your preference.
To your original point though, yes, shady companies will continue to behave in unethical ways.