For years, our users have been asking us to implement Stories in Telegram. More than half of all feature requests that we receive are related to Stories.
Initially, we were against this since Stories are already everywhere. However, Telegram wouldn't be Telegram if we didn't listen to our users and...
It looks like they are going to focus on privacy and more granular ephemerality.
I wish they added polls to chats (just for the lulz), but Stories could be a nice addition.
I remember when imo randomly added stories to it's multi IM app and it seeming forced then. That was a decade ago.
In retrospect, they were faced with the legacy IM providers shutting down and the new providers shutting them out. But it still wasn't any good for the users.