The issue is that we used to have both irc and forums. Discord has taken on the role of both in 1. Unfortunately, that means that it also needs the remote search capabilities of a forum to not screw over the community, long term.

It's amazing the number of times a 3+ year old discussion on either a forum, or Reddit has bailed me out of a hole. Everything like that on discord is cut off, unless you know it exists.

Popular IRC channels usually have an searchable web archive. But yes, chat is not a good solution for stuff that needs to be documented.