Chat is an important medium, especially as new generations of developers enter the field (they are more chat native). It certainly offers a more comfortable, or appropriate place, to ask beginner questions, or have quick back-n-forths, than GitHub issues/discussions offers. I've always wondered why GH didn't incorporate chat, seems like a big missed opportunity.
I've been wondering the same thing recently. It's really inefficient for me to communicate with my fellow maintainers through Github discussions, issues and pull request conversations so my go-to has been private discord conversations. This is actually kind of inefficent since most open source repos will always have a bigger community on github vs on discord (not to mention that it's a hassle when some maintainers are Chinese and don't have access to Discord...)
