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?
This is correct. The bubbles were indeed green in early versions, but they used black text, as opposed to the current white text. See screenshot here: https://www.imore.com/iphone-os-2-1-review
and using the contrast checker thing, it jumps up to almost a 10 just by changing to black. https://coolors.co/contrast-checker/000000-65c466