"Meaningless" isn't accurate at this point. Media doesn't get nearly as severely downgraded (if at all), so the user experience of using an RCS chat is better than SMS/MMS.
There are still disparities, though, that should be presented. There's no standardized end-to-end encryption yet for RCS (although it could be argued Google's protocol is a de facto standard), and Apple has indicated it will be implementing RCS as the standard dictates, i.e. with no E2E encryption. Using blue bubble to indicate E2E encrypted and green to indicate otherwise is a reasonable UX choice.
After Apple implements E2E encryption over RCS via whatever standard (which can be reasonably inferred as their intention from their announcements), if the delineation for green-vs-blue is still iMessage/not-iMessage (rather than E2E vs not-E2E), then I think "meaningless" applies. But we're not there yet.
Sure, but if Beeper keeps working, likely some free alternative isn't far behind, and if that means your messages don't come up as blue, that will be everyone's preference.
"Encouraging shittiness" because they're pointing out a lack of feature parity with a color seems like a stretch. Google has done the same exact thing by pushing a number of chat apps in their ecosystem, the only difference is that Apple has succeeded.
It's not a stretch at all. They are well aware of the weird culty green bubble clique attitudes. And there are plenty of things they could do to allow imessage on Android. And even if they still didn't want to do that, they didn't need to choose an entirely different color for non imessage messages, they could be more subtle in alerting iphone users the other person in the convo has less features available to them. Much of the time it isn't even relevant.
