The functionality is amazing but the UX/UI is not polished to the level of a commercial product like Slack or Discord (or Twitter, which it is arguably more comparable to)
Clean and functional perhaps, but based on that screenshot, I would agree that it needs a lot of UI work.
The bold text being the same size and weight as the username while having the same alignment, the reply icons being the same size as the user icons, no real spacing difference between the username and post content vs the username and post above it, the spacing in general mostly separates things rather than organize things... and that's just from looking at one screenshot. Compare it to a screenshot for slack: while there are surely things you might like more than the slack interface, you can deny that through holistically manipulating alignment, spacing, text size and weight, scale, etc. you can instantly visually parse what's grouped and what's not, what are people's usernames, what's message content, what's metadata and what's reaction/reply content, etc. all while packing more on the screen. Simple things like visual hierarchy and gestalt do a lot of work for them.
That stuff is crucial for an efficient corporate messaging application that needs to be easily visually parsable.
UI design (and most other visual work) is much deeper and more difficult than most developers realize. Laymen familiar with CSS frameworks can make something that looks designed in their estimation, but when it comes to functionality, it falls flat every time. This is why we need more designers in FOSS.
A lot of non-developers that use some cobbled together amalgam of tutorial code pasted into wordpress themes never have any performance problems with their site. If people are using these things for their own personal projects, then who cares. If they're posing them as in industrial tool, someone with a better vantage point should probably tell them they're about to step in shit.
Different people have different use cases. Many people-- support, customer service, incident response, etc. need to be able to parse those screens incredibly quickly all day long. The small amounts of time that people spend visually orienting themselves on these pages not only takes up time, it unnecessarily imposes a cognitive load. While you could have a code editor that used the glyphs, cursor, and layout of a word processor, and a low-volume coder might not even care, for most developers, it would just be exhausting to visually parse all day long. For many people, communication tools are essentially their code editors and their work is often far more time sensitive than a developer's.
