The thing is, between stuff like this and nitro, discord can fund itself without ads. Something like this literally helps everyone involved. If you don't want to donate to a server, then don't. It's literally that simple.

I get tired of people jumping on this bandwagon because it's popular to hate on discord. The people that are hating on it generally are the ones who fundamentally do not understand what is going on. They read some ragebait article and instead of digging a little bit deeper in trying to understand they just take it at face value. It's very irritating. The latest buzzword is "enshitification", which, by itself is a good descriptor for some things but these people throw it around so liberally that it loses all significance. "Oh an app did something I don't like and I'm not going to take the time to learn more about it ".

Think of it this way... Discord is doing a Patreon but for discord servers. This is cool. This is neat. It hurts exactly no one and helps potentially everyone. At the most it's a net zero effect for most users.