You are right, Telegram is VERY popular media platform in Eastern Europe. In particular it's very popular tool to resist government's censorship and propaganda in such dictatorship's states like Russia or Belarus. People are put in jail even if they just read some opposition telegram channels, so using bridges like this one is an attempt to mitigate those risks.

No, in this implementation I just scrap web-version of the Telegram and don't use their API. For more complex parsing of telegram posts (like extraction of attachments, user reactions and replies) you will need to use their API and for sure it will require to have an account