"k-id, the age verification provider discord uses doesn't store or send your face to the server. instead, it sends a bunch of metadata about your face and general process details."

I think the primary issue is not the "send your face" (face info) to a server. The problem is that private entities are greedy for user data, in this case tying facial recognition to activities related to interacting with other people, most of them probably real people. So this creates a huge database - it is no surprise that greedy state actors and private companies want that data. You can use it for many things, including targeted ads.

For me the "must verify" is clearly a lie. They can make it "sound logical" but that does not convince me in the slightest. Back in the age of IRC (I started with mIRC in the 1990s, when I was using windows still), the thought of requiring others to show their faces never occurred to me at all. There were eventually video-related formats but to me it felt largely unnecessary for the most part. Discord is (again to me) nothing but a fancier IRC variant that is controlled by a private (and evidently greedy) actor.

So while it is good to have the information how to bypass anything there, my biggest gripe is that people should not think about it in this way. Meaning, bypassing is not what I would do in this case; I would simply abandon the private platform altogether. People made Discord big; people should make Discord small again if they sniff after them.