Perhaps I'm being a bit doom and gloom about this, because I think it's probably pretty reasonable that Discord is searching for any sort of additional revenue stream they can get. Based on the numerous attempts at increasing monetization on the platform, I imagine because they need it.

That said, the last thing I want in a chat platform is a metric ton of additional untrusted code in an application that has more access and permissions than I think a chat app needs. If there's no way for me to opt out of having this code execute on my machine, I'm probably going to switch to a PWA if I can, because then I believe I have more control over what permissions third party code has access to.