Human behavior is funny, isn't it? No matter what the topic, there are always people around who like to repeat criticism they heard from someone else, even if it's so vague as to be useless ("metadata disaster") or they don't understand the details at all.
It's not a disaster. A few minor bits of metadata (avatars and reactions, IIRC) haven't been moved into the encrypted part of the protocol yet. If that's a problem for your use case, then you might want to choose a platform with different flaws, or simply avoid those features. It's already good enough for the needs of many privacy-minded folks, though, and it continues to get better.