I've had some kickback from people including 1 saying he just won't message if I'm not on imessage because he hates whatsapp so much. Well ok bud your choice mate
BUT when I look at it, although I live in imessage on my iphone, most of the messages in were actually sms/texts! from multi factor auth, from websites, from credit card companies sending verification texts and so on. So there aren't actually THAT many pure blue bubble conversations and most of those are already on my whatsapp.
I think your observations a far nearer the norm for most
SMS has been on the decline for years now and is mainly propped up by the institutions you note (eg Banks/2 factor etc)
There is obviously a natural bias on reporting how important or common imessage is in the US as we are on an Apple forum and like most of us native English speaking members we tend to read from sites, influencers, reviews etc etc that are mostly American
What scarce and factual data we have seems to imply the popularity is overly stated and more from the natural bias we read than reality
Simply from market dominance Apple is just over 50-54% so almost half of the US are not using Imessages
. Messenger was the dominant e message service in US and Whats-app was getting on for 100m users in the US.
We because of where we choose to read or interact are likely to see more of this bias where whole groups or families only have Imessage contacts
Of course there are groups and clumps of people that are part of social and economic demographics that for many varied reasons eg marketing, fashion and status to name a few propagate some aspects and as we have seen recently not always in a healthy way among teens
