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.