Why did this become a thing? Don’t they get sick of answering the same question every day?
But that’s why forums exist. My guess is they just want to mine more data to sell.

What extra data would they get from Discord over a forum?

In my experience, it’s usually smaller projects that do this. I’m guessing it’s just easier/cheaper for them to throw it on discord than setup a proper forum/wiki, because that’s the platform they’re already familiar with

#1 reason I hate it is the fact it’s not globally searchable. That and the fact Discord search isn’t great is probably why they’re answering the same questions over and over

Yeah lack of search engine indexing is why I’ve avoided discord. But now that the search engines are dying and slopifying, I’m not sure it really matters.