Excessive information can be overwhelming. I fully hate these design decisions, but I can see where the original drive to reduce clutter came from. This seems like "way too much of a good thing" rather than an outright bad thing.

Once you discover once that swiping sideways on a message reveals metadata, you notice that this is transferrable to most messengers on iOS (all I use). The first time I discovered that was by accident while playing with the device. I notice that I pretty much never use this feature.