I don't know why people say this is a feature of iphonesm All I hear is people complaining that texting g doest work very well on iphone.im an android guy, and have never had a problem texting nobody.
It's an issue with apple not wanting to either share their message protocol(which is understandable) or integrate rcs which would make almost everything to work as intended
It boggles the mind that people won't just install WhatsApp or Signal or Telegram or anything of the sort, and would rather exclude people from group chats or deal with a worse experience. I mean, it's not that big of an ask! I'm sure most people have more than one app on their phone that just sits there and wastes space, why not replace it with one of those? Heck, even Facebook's Messenger could be an alternative.
I guess its American culture. iPhone is an American company, I can imagine a nationalist feeling very proud of their accomplishments. I've seen screengrabs of "when I see the green text, I block", which sounds very meme'y (word?) but feels like it could be true.