Doesn't help with the issues around searching for data from outside of discord.
Unless it's changed recently users can enter Discord communities without an email via an invite link*, just choosing a username. It's what made onboarding so easy and similar to just joining an IRC server with a nick.
What's been ironic is since Freenode had their spam issues years back there was a push among many channels on that network to allow only registered users (ie: email tied to nicks) to post, which has continued over in the migration to the Libera network and I find really unfortunate for such channels of those networks as low friction and less permanence in ties to identity have been a distinguishing feature of IRC. (Obviously this doesn't affect IRC broadly but those are among the largest networks for tech communities).