Not sure what you mean here. To me Signal is just another startup that wants to keep control over the market and uses excuses such as "federation leads to fragmentation and bad UX" in order to put its own interests ahead of the users. To me they are no different than FB or Google.
Forgive me for being dense, but I still don't get the point you are trying to make. Do you think Signal is worthy of some praise that the alternatives are not? Was their software ready to compete with the status quo of the time in features?