> Normal people are not fond of Discord UI specifically, they just get used to it.
Disagree. I think most people are pretty okay with it, maybe not in love with it, but they don't see it as particularly bad in most respects either. I use Google's corp chat for work and my god, Discord is SO much better than that it blows me away.
I think that HN users seem to not fundamentally understand the needs of online groups beyond what is necessary to carry out an asynchronous open source engineering project. Much of the "bells-and-whistles" that discord offers are _essential_ to both the day-to-day communication of these groups as well as to moderators. Element does not come fully replicate some core features offering an outright less stable experience. Slack/Teams are not accessible to private users. Telegram has even less features than Element/Matrix.