It is a web wrapper, you can even enable (but only if you want) vencord or equicord so i am sure it is a web wrapper, also, i just remembered that the first time i used it, it had like 90/100 mb of ram usage then i changed i did something in the settings and it went down to a steady 22mb, if i remember correctly i installed "OpenAsar DOM optimizer" shelter plugin (which you can use alongside vencord/equicord)

Edit: just checked, it uses Tauri, so on linux you may have some problems like some lag

I use discord quite heavily; the TOS violation and risk of ban has me a little risk averse when it comes to discord

It's actually hard to get banned for these things, mainly because discord don't give a fuck and many are hard to detect, the thing that may ban you are API abuses but just stay away from those plugins and don't touch experiments; I never got banned in 2 years of using mods and clients, and i did some crazy stuff