Oh yeah they definitely aren’t to be seen as the “good guy” and they absolutely could make it impossible to hand over.
They are deciding to favour data/profits over people’s privacy.
BUT the distinction should still be made that they could be made to do it, regardless whether they want to.
Then there’s the whole other conversation around back doors (like the government asked Apple to do in their iPhones).
It’s been a while since I looked it up, and I don’t use WhatsApp, but I believe it’s E2E encrypted but the mechanism they use allows their servers to also hold the keys to decrypt.
Presumably they hold a master key that all other keys are derived from.