Nothing prevents you from denying read permissions to bots in "private" channels. Slash commands are still available even if you do. If you still need normal functionality, you can always restrict the bot to its own channel.

The only thing this prevents is new bot authors from, well, writing interesting bots.

Correct, this is what we do on a reasonably large server (tens of thousands). Public channels are free game, staff channels are restricted from bots. Honestly I dont see a bot owner having a budget to store all that message data I store only very specific meaningful data. For example I have a bot where users can message our bot to contact our staff team. You can see why reading message_content is extremely useful. This allows mods to communicate to users via the bot and appear fully impartial.

Soon I fear my efforts are going to be thrown away because I dont want to expose personal information with Discord.

How long before we read a headline here on HN that someone hacked all Discords verified bot developer information? No thanks.

As somebody else in this thread stated, Discord is a platform mostly for young people. I doubt most users are aware that bots are a privacy risk. How are they going to know that they need to create a separate bot-free channel for their private discussions. This isn't something users should even need to worry about.

How do they know that they can't just say whatever on Twitter? Because it's effectively the same thing.

I mean, every user of that channel can do that as well. It's just that there shouldn't be expectation of privacy on a Discord channel unless you know and trust every participant.

Message reading bots are very useful for many things. Limiting them because of privacy concerns sounds like a loss for no gain to me. There isn't any privacy on Discord to begin with.

+ AFAIK Discord said they aren't going to completely remove message access, just lock it behind a privilileged intent. What's stopping malicious developers from adding features such as bad link detection, chat activity leveling system, thus giving them a reason to say to Discord, hey, we need message access, and then using the message access for these malicious reasons.