How much of this is a long-term bet that the US DOJ's antitrust case against Apple (at least the iMessage-specific argument) will result in the forced opening up of the platform, such that Beeper (now Automattic) will sustainably function?
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It would be very surprising if they forced Apple to let competitors use their protocol and servers. Worst case scenario they might force them to let any chat app on the iPhone include SMS, that's the only real advantage that the first-party Messages app has over competitors.
I'm surprised Whatsapp hasn't gone after them yet. They are famous for going after small independant open source maintainers for similar projects.
I'm sure that's a non-zero factor. Plus Beeper has a lot of name recognition due to their epic standoff
Is it really anti-trust if you reverse engineered something (deliberately breaking the ToS of said service - Apple can suspend your accounts for doing so) while said service ToS, a contract you sign when you use their service, explicitly forbids reverse engineering?
A more succinct question would be "can antitrust laws override the ToS?" The answer is "yes". The FTC can even make Apple change its ToS through a consent decree (and possibly through other mechanisms as well). A ToS can't shield you from antitrust enforcement. In this case, it might even hurt Apple, especially if it can be shown that Apple doesn't consistently apply this rule.
But let's say it's not antitrust, which is what your question is trying to imply. Apple will still need to answer to the other ways it makes third-party messaging apps worse on iOS - automatic offloading and share extensions being two examples.