It's not that surprising. If you live in the US and don't need to text people in other countries, you probably can avoid WhatsApp pretty easily, but it's pretty much the defacto option for texting non-US family and friends, and in many countries it's the predominant form of mass communication.
UK here, have never and will never use any fcbook property and didn't use Whatsapp before then. For me it's Signal, Matrix or folk can SMS me to give up their privacy without pushing me into using other services to do so.
