Clearly discord has more of a vested interest in boosting engagement - especially now that they are showing people "quests". What a quirky and fun way to say "ads"!

But at the same time I don't necessarily buy the idea that all of their reactions/roles/badges/etc are exclusively malevolent engagement-driven design decisions meant to hook people. I do think that some of them are legitimate improvements to chat communication, and as a result many of those features have proliferated across other messaging platforms. Hell, most of them didn't even originate at discord at all but were cribbed from their competitors.

To be clear, I 1000% agree with you that IRC is less addicting. Even just by simple merit of not having multi-device push notifications. Those pull me back into the app. But push notifications across devices are also just objectively useful. I name that one in particular because it's one of the biggest and most notable features that prevents me from returning to IRC, where I happily did most of my chat until the mid 2010s. I'm actively shopping for a discord alternative as a regular user who is fed up with discord's march toward enshittification, and matrix looks like it gives me most of that convenience without the worst parts of discord.