Well, they aren’t just forcing it on all phones, they’re also forcing students to install it (my university forced me to install it to log in to the university systems, for example), house chats are being forcefully migrated to Max, everyone that they can force to use it is being forced to use it.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that people actually use it - from what I can tell, people do want to migrate from Telegram, because of it being really slow and proxies working poorly, but to anything other than Max - I’ve heard people talk about imo (or something? I have no idea). My uni group’s Max chat only has, like, three people in it, and we haven’t actually migrated away from Telegram.
There’s also more stupid stuff about Max, like it forcing you to register a sole proprietorship or LLC to make a bot (and if you make a sole proprietorship, the Max bot’s username will include your full legal name), and it apparently checking to see if you have a VPN installed on your phone, but I don’t really know that much because I don’t actually use it (I just have it installed to read 2FA codes for my uni).
I’ve also seen people put Max in the heaviest sandboxes they can find, maybe even put it on separate phones with nothing else on them, so you can tell that quite a bit people really don’t trust the app.