It does and it sucks. But you can still have adequate protection because knowing your number won’t help authorities much. They have to find you in some group they deem illegal for anything to happen. They must find your account first, then add your number and see if that’s your account. Telegram did some improvements on that issue at some point, so it should take much longer and more resources to do.
Also it’s relatively easy to get a sim card not tied to your passport in Russia. Also using a cheap sim from another country is also an option, since you can set up a cloud password so that even if someone has your sim they won’t access your data fully.
This might as well be a honey pot for trapping more lgbt people.
A service requirement of a telephone number is not a honey spot. But sure some groups are honey spots. Yes, authorities mainly operate within the service. It can get to overwhelming extent but that mist mean they don’t have real backdoor-like access.