I know in GrapheneOS that the Google Play Services are sandboxed and you can install them in a specific user profile, but I’m not sure if doing that still gives you notifications across those profiles

Hopefully someone with a little more knowledge of this can help? lol

It might be a good substitute for some. Some features like contact and storage scopes are missing, and IMO they’re pretty cool Overall just worse privacy and security compared to Graphene

The desktop client logs and sends lists of currently running processes by default, and they also collect usage data (which channels you open, how long for, who you’re interacting with). In the settings, there’s literally an option for “Use data to customize my Discord experience”. And sure, they don’t show ads, but their third-party integrations do. Article with sources

In the end, processing and storing millions of texts, images, videos and files permanently, and hosting all those live voice and video calls, and making updates to the clients, will always cost more than what they get from Nitro and server boosting. Discord isn’t profitable; they have to make the deficit up to shareholders somehow.

At least you can block some of the telemetry with uBlock or similar

By default, sure. But uBlock is way more powerful when you configure it. Seriously, take a look at their wiki. I doubt that Brave lets you choose exactly which domains to connect to on a per-site basis. And do you really want an advertising company to make your adblocker? They’ve done shadier stuff.