We used it a lot over the pandemic and random crashes and having to restart because it started using way too many system resources was extremely common. Nobody left it open when not in active use, because it was such a resource hog. Using it on battery would take a macbook from full to 0% in like two hours flat. This was with a couple very small private groups only, no use of large public channels or anything.

Strange, I've never had that happen and I've used discord for years. A good portion of that time was spent using it on my 2015 MacBook Pro.

I had lots of issues on my M1 Mac, mostly it was solved by running their beta version though. No issues on any other platforms

it is because they are not afraid to drop to native when it makes sense, see:

https://discord.com/blog/why-discord-is-sticking-with-react-...

react-native is NOT a total replacement for native code, you still need native devs. It is more like instead of 5 ios and 5 android devs you need 4 JS, 1 android and 1 ios devs (but the ios and android persons also need to know JS)

I have to assume it's partly because they never update Electron -- I've not been able to run it under Wayland for a few months now

--ozone-platform=WAYLAND ?

That is indeed how I would enable it, but it stopped working! I get this:

    interface 'wl_output' has no event 4

The desktop client is, to me, not as performant as it should be. Many actions take several hundred milliseconds when it's obvious that they could be much faster.