Discord is one of the few companies that don't shove 3rd party ads down your throat. But they do advertise the hell out of nitro. And yeah, I don't find nitro interesting enough to pay that much.

I pay for it.

The cost is worth the extra quality when working with others over screenshare etc. The community management features are useful. A large portion of my workflow is aided by discord and GitHub, both of whi h I pay for premium features.

I don't expect them to provide these services for free considering the huge boost they give to productivity. Expecting them to be free is naive.