The war has slowed down too. It's doesn't need some kind of conspiracy for the media to jump on the next exiting event when the previous one grows stale.
Signal is not much better than WhatsApp or any other walled garden messenger without provider choice. Don't waste your time and energy to move people to walled gardens. A better idea would be to use providers and apps that support the federated internet standard XMPP: https://joinjabber.org
It's quite telling that in Austria the far right wants to stop financing the ORF altogether by talking about how the population is forced to pay ORF fees and that it has a left wing bias.