I have no idea about phone number changes (I've had the same phone number for 20 years), but my phone broke not terribly long ago and I had to reinstall everything. As I recall, my Signal data came back just fine. Looks like you have to enable it[0], so I assume that's what I did.

> The "tied to your phone number" thing is weird for me, both Telegram and Signal.

Isn't this restriction also applicable to WhatsApp?

[0] https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...