In real life, when someone interrupts you, it's always with some context. Even if your little sibling comes to telling you that there is something really important that you must listen to right now, you have the context that it's from your little sibling, and you know in what tone of voice they are speaking.
Why, then, do we let chat message sounds interrupt our lives, requiring us to look at our screens as if every ding could potentially be super important? We probably shouldn't.
Two ideas, actually, for chat apps:
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Allow users to set a custom alert tone for each chat. Custom ringtones have been a thing for over a decade -- bring them back!
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Allow the sender to specify whether the receiver should get a normal or gentle notification for the message. I suspect that most initial messages in a conversation aren't be time sensitive but subsequent messages are time sensitive if there is an ongoing conversation.