I think there's a tendency to dismiss this argument in the XMPP community (but there's a lot of truth to it, I choose to use the XMPP desktop clients but none of them are as nice to use as any big commercial IM providers client), but also a tendency for people to make this argument without realizing that they're comparing open source projects run by one or two people to VC funded projects with a company backing them. Of course Discord or Element or whatever will be "better" in some ways, they have a team and millions of VC funding behind them. However, one of the many reasons I chose to use XMPP back in the day when I was first evaluating whether to use it or Matrix, and one of the big reasons I got more heavily involved in the community later, was specifically because the standards body wasn't strictly tied to a company looking for VC funding (and all the individual client/server projects I've contributed to are the same). But, this does mean there aren't really any clients that I'm in love with (but there are clients for every random niche platform imaginable, which I think is probably more important personally).
All that being said, try Snikket if you haven't. It's relatively new, but I think they're really doing a good job of creating a suite of clients that can be recommended to "normies" who don't want to sacrifice shiny graphics for the sake of using something that's a bit more free from VC influence.