I asked if people chose iPhone for the blue bubbles elsewhere a couple days ago, and while there was some good discourse on that post, the blue bubbles definitely also came up as a reason.
In my experience, when people find out my texts are green, they oftentimes would rather switch to a different platform altogether like Instagram or just not text at all.
Is this actually a deal-breaker in friendships out there?
Actually that not true. It just the image/video is sent over MMS which is a standard from 2002 and is limited to 2Mbs in size and 99% of photos taken now adays I such larger then that so MMS compresses it before its sent.
Apple has had 5 years to implement the higher resolution image standard. They are intentionally not.