I wholeheartedly support the step back to forums. The only problem I am having with it is providing real-time dedicated (and most importantly private) support to individual users. This is something that was crucial to many communities over at Discord where you were spoiled for choice in terms of solutions to this.

NodeBB doesn't really have a solution to this as far as I can tell. I've been looking for several days but the only option I can see, other than contact forms which do not meet the required specs, is a deprecated plugin that isn't readily available on the ACP.

A real issue that NodeBB is going to face if it wants to step up against Discord is, as has been discussed already, the issue of everything being all in one place. That's what Discord did well and that's what it cornered the market on. No network of platforms is going to replace that. It has to be centralised. A forum obviously can't replace the voice channels of Discord but it can excel for text based communications. However, it needs to be a complete package in that regard and flexible to the needs of people coming over from Discord.