Swiss privacy laws are stronger

This is mostly true, but even Switzerland has its fair share of shady stuff. The Swiss federal police was caught using the Pegasus malware (source is in German)

The goverment also went along with CIA-led mass surveillance

This is kinda misleading, the only thing they can "track" about you using Newpipe is your IP address, which doesn't reveal as much info as metadata/tracking scripts in the official app do. Use a VPN and you're good

you could create your own Signal server

I thought self hosting wasn't possible with Signal?

That's good to know