I thoguht it was more like WhatsApp with extra security?

About the opposite, WhatsApp is Telegram with extra security. Telegram is not secure at all. It's not even E2E for anything but "secure chats" which its desktop client doesn't have.

So not social media at all - just a messenger client.

In channels and group chats it has reactions similar to social media and used as such. Channels are like blogs - they consist of posts by the channel's authors with a link to comments. Channels and group chats can be private or public. Private ones you can't search for and can join if somebody adds you.

You don't have any kind of news feed, yes. But in general it's pretty close to social media in experience.

Creating a channel and posting something there is similar to your page in Facebook, just optional. You can add the link to it in your profile description so that people could go there after clicking at your avatar pic in a group chat, for example.

In fact it is being used like social media. Just no news feed and no friends (contacts are rather similar to that anyway).

EDIT: Describing it made me realize that I'm probably unfair to Durov. If from VK the most important things he'd remove were friends and news feeds, then he might actually be not such a bad person. It's just that I want a p2p messenger\social network with user directory, like old Skype, but completely p2p. It wouldn't become worse if it had Telegram-like channels functionality, just first things first.