Seems like Messenger is getting WeChat-ized - in China, WeChat [0] is your one-stop shop to getting anything done - chatting, following celebrities, booking housekeeping, payments, even "mini-programs". And now many Western messaging apps are starting to take inspiration from this [1].
Is it working though? Just because Facebook keeps adding features doesn’t necassarily mean that people are using those features at the same scale as WeChat. I avoid Facebook messenger entirely, but are others using it for all these ancillary things like sending friends money?
My (non-technical) friends & family, as anecdotal evidence, seem almost universally happy about switching to Facebooks Lite Messenger. (An app that only provides messaging functionality.)