Well, it's not privacy-focused.. but I do like Revolt for this purpose. It's performant, looks very similar to Discord, and I think they're adding E2EE eventually.
Why do people like Matrix? It's really slow. Even most of the non-Electron clients consume a ton of resources (even more than Electron apps usually do).
Especially Gomuks, by far the worst offender. It consumes nearly a gigabyte of memory and it's a TUI.
I can understand why this may be a issue to some people. I think if they asked Windows users this, there wouldn't be as much of a strong reaction to this. Maybe it comes off as exploiting the good will of the Linux community, but I can't read minds.
I'm personally ok with this. If someone willingly volunteers and enjoys doing this, then what's the problem? But again, I'm not sure if that's the core issue at hand here.
I like C++. :)