Similar experience here. Some companies just want to pin a scapegoat should they be held liable. Others are just assholes from top to bottom.
You did your due diligence. You almost got burned. Decide for yourself if it’s worth it next time. Not every act in good faith receives a good response.
I’m all for jumping ship on the grounds of this being an overreach. However there just aren’t any good alternatives to Discord which would entice the general public from following suit.
Discord has the advantage of being a very frictionless user experience. You make one account and can join whatever servers you want thanks to its centralized design. It has file sharing, gif and video support, voice channels, screen sharing, API support with websocket events, and a hefty amount of bots to ease management.
There are other solutions but they don't cover the same amount of features. Some focus on voice, some focus on chat, and some try to do as much but the experience isn’t quite robust. It’ll be like Reddit users and the API fiasco that people thought would be its downfall: the activists will leave but the general community won’t care enough, or aren’t tech-savvy enough, to be bothered.
Some states have already begun to require sites to detect connections from VPNs and block them.
Seriously. There are better ways to ensure privacy with identity verification.