A telegram-like chat approach promotes the timeline, it works when there are no deep discussions, just a lot of first-level messages, *or* the discussions are limited to a few users.
If these two situations are mixed, the discussion (sub thread) is inevitably lost between the single messages.
So, the effectiveness of the chat context depends on the interaction's style among the users. Btw, today users are anyway more used to chat interfaces, so it could be preferred for a cognitive bias.

I would like to test it, maybe with a in-thread option to switch between the two modes, and so compare the difference live.