Disdain for an entire country of diverse people based on the (stupid, bad) actions of the minority in power is a bit much...

complete feature parity isn't a good goal, or the alternatives will always be behind. Partial parity, with some features Discord doesn't have (e.g. E2EE) is an achievable goal which does successfully encourage migration

I've been using it as my only form of messaging with most of my contacts for several years, many of whom have little knowledge of technology. It's really not.

Yup, that's what DMA should solve (edit: or, rather, will solve, when Whatsapp fully complies with it)

depends what you mean by closer -- by features and ease of use, Matrix is the closest you can get to Whatsapp right now. XMPP is good, though!

ah, hopefully with the Digital Markets Act in the EU, reliable bridging to Matrix with E2EE intact will come quickly. You can already bridge (e.g. I run mautrix-whatsapp), but its not in an ideal state

Matrix!

Machine Unlearning is a very active field right now but basically ~~no~~ not really