PC Gaming

Seems like a good time for people to stand up a new servers and invite the gaming masses.

Personally I don't think it's ready as a Discord replacement, based on the troubles displayed in the video, such as not being able to get things like video calls or screenshare working easily when self-hosting.

I’ve seen occasional claims of that for a few years now, yet not once have I seen any credible evidence of it.

I'm assuming you haven't seen the GN video in the OP yet, but they go into that connection, which they personally feel is bad enough to not use it. The issue is that Matrix was created and funded by Amdocs, an Israeli company with possible connections to Israeli intelligence.

The matrix foundation themselves admit to being funded by Amdocs, such as here on their blog:

As unpopular as VC funding is in some circles, the Matrix community owes a huge debt of thanks to Element’s investors (Status, Notion, firstminute, Dawn, Automattic, Protocol Labs and Metaplanet) and Amdocs for funding over $50M of work on both Matrix and Element since 2017.

and here in their FAQ:

How is Matrix[.]org funded? For the first three years of Matrix’s development (2014-2017), most of the core contributors worked for Amdocs, who paid for them to work fulltime on Matrix. In July 2017, Amdocs considered the project to be sufficiently successful that it could now self-support and so stopped funding.

They also specifically attempt to offer their chat services to law enforcement, such as the time they bought a booth at a law enforcement convention, which caused this controversy.