alt Hacker NewsThis about Play Services and not the Play Store. Play Services are a bunch of extra APIs/services that Google does not make available as part of AOSP. The non-nefarious reason is to make it possible to fix bugs and roll out features faster because the OEMs are terrible at rolling out new Android versions. The possible nefarious reason is to make more of Android closed-source.
At any rate, microG is a reimplementation of Play Services.
You can directly download the Telegram APK from: https://telegram.org/android
(Or using the app store that is part of /e/OS and serves as a front for both the Play Store and F-Droid.)
They could also have it decoupled from the OS with an open-source version, these are two different subjects.
The real reason to me is that they want to avoid Android forks outside of their control.