If anyone else other than the intended recipient, be it Meta or Google or the government, can read the message, then its not “end to end” anymore.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. So long as all data is encrypted in transmission such that only the end points can read it, I’m pretty sure that qualifies as end-to-end encryption.

The problem is that the end points are not truly autonomous; they are subject to the whims and demands of the company that writes the software, sometimes acting under complete secrecy. If WhatsApp decides to siphon data from the end points, that can be very difficult to determine and prove. End-to-end encryption is only valuable if you can trust the end points not to snitch, but you can’t fully trust closed source software for this very reason, among others.