The thing is, Discord is a place where most people are. I've seen many many alternatives to chats, social media platform and forums, and safe as they may be, when you are all alone there, it will eventually get pretty boring and then it's often the matter of going back to the old, with all the risks it has, or remaining on your own.
I've been on a few alternates for Facebook, but in the end, there was nothing to do there. Although I didn't recover my Facebook account, and I am still staying away from there.
When Twitter was under fire, there were alternates like TruthSocial and Parler, however both were soon deserted, or filled with people only praising Donald Trump. Now I don't want to fire up a political discussion about Trump being good or bad, my point is rather that the world is more than just Donald Trump regardless if you love or hate the guy. So in the end Twitter was the place to go. Of course, now that Elon Musk bought it, things changed there, but if Musk is to be trusted, is something I am still not sure about.
Discord is not that much different. I know many Slack channels went to Discord due to Discord being better than Slack, well, when it comes to general user interface. If Slack is much safer, I don't know either. Of course, there's also Telegram. It seems to be pretty safe, although there are a few things about Telegram (in usage) that I don't really like. Getting myself onto servers without my consent, and all of them being scam sites about cryptocurrencies also doesn't really make my day well (at least that doesn't happen on Discord).
That Discord is not really trustworthy was something I only expected. I've had a few scammers on my tail also (although that's not Discord's fault. Any big network is bound to attract internet criminals, no matter how secure it is, you must always be aware of that). Time will tell if Discord will remain the main chat or if people will move. And that will take time. I mean, everybody knows that Facebook (or should I say "Failbook"?) is a scam, yet people are still on that platform. For some reason it's very hard to get people to move.