That's valid, and I think I was coming off a bit of frustration from the previous comment I made in this chain. There are so many new apps that all try and build the features of discord, but always seem to base in closed protocols and so rarely use protocols that already exist, and with that add to the "15 competing standards" problem. Which is why I get much more excited by projects like Movim.
With all of that though, while I agree element has hiccups, XMPP has been around forever and is solid. We saw this with twitter migration too, the existence of other servers makes it seem more difficult, when that's not really the case. As this video shows, go to the place to want to sign up, give a user and password, confirm you're human, and use it. That's already less than the email confirmation of discord.