RCS is already live in the US for iOS 18 Beta users, and will come to all iPhones in 2 months. It’s also an awful spec, you don’t have to dig far to find that. Operators have basically just farmed out implementation of it to Google.

I don’t know why you’re trying to pick a fight. It’s a simple fact. MMS was the standard for years, and iMessage compressed photos & videos less than that. RCS is now coming, flawed as it is.

End of story. It’s just one in a list of many features that made iMessage popular, all implemented years before RCS was a thing. You can move on to complaining about something else on a platform you don’t use and don’t care about.