It is friction. No matter how little you think it matters, adding friction always loses people. In this case, they're the old-hands types; if you think your project would benefit from losing those in favor of newbies, sure, you can make that choice.

Like I said, messing around with someone's email verification nonsense probably with a captcha and stupid questions on top is likely more than I want to spend on seeing if someone who might help me with a transient issue is even available, so I am unlikely to do so.

> Discord works perfectly fine as a simple webpage

It has a webapp, but it does not work "perfectly fine" in my experience. The UX is bewilderingly complex; it took me several minutes to figure out how to make it stop ringing more bells and whistles than a las vegas casino. I had a hard time even figuring out what symbols were meant to be buttons that get clicked; even finding the settings screen was a pain in the ass. It's truly awful.

Out of curiosity, what IRC client do you use?

Formerly xchat, now hexchat. I also leave weechat idling in a tmux session.

My take on discord is that it's been designed for the zoomer/gamer demographic; the sort of people who also get sucked in by gacha games. Lots of sounds and colors that leave the user dazed and intoxicated.