It provides a lot of nice syntactic sugar that you would otherwise have to write a wrapper for on top of Fetch. Built in request interception, request transformation, (de)serialization, shared request config, timeout/retries management, …
Though this definitely comes with bloat and supply chain risks.
Do you use features like permissions, channels, threads, bots, … a lot ?
Application using xmpp as a backend are great and can be all you need if you just want a simple voice/text chat with no additional features.
There is no equivalent to most “server/community” features of discord in the xmpp protocol, and it is something that needs to be implemented at that level for it to work.
I like xmpp, but it is not a discord alternative. It is a WhatsApp / Signal / iMessage alternative.
It doesn’t have 80% of discord features, I use discord a lot and I don’t have a single group chat.
Matrix / Element is a way better alternative feature wise.
4.0.0 was the release of the Rust rewrite
Vim/neovim if you are willing to take the time to learn how to use / config it.
Micro otherwise, very sensible keybinds and ux that map to modern gui apps, though it doesn’t come installed in most distro unlike ed and nano.