It serves the key purpose of Mumble, in that it provides a reliable way to get in a voice chat with people. The other features (text chat, video calls, screen sharing, “servers” that let people aggregate for a dedicated purpose/community) come together to make a legitimately good product that’s hard to replace.

Is there a peer to peer equivalent to Discord? That feels like it would be the best option, since it wouldn’t rely on a centralized company that could enshittify the product.

It is a bit baffling. I think it’s more ethical than the alternative though: pay gating useful functionality. Offering paid pallete swaps doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, someone who would never pay for that, but it does at least mean I can just ignore it. If they were to, say, restrict voice calls to a paid subscription, suddenly I’m in a position where either I’m paying for the service or ditching it entirely.

In the long term, yes. Ideally your birth rate matches your death rate so you have stability in supporting the citizenry. But when your system expects the birth rate to exceed the death rate, even changing to equilibrium can be catastrophic.

I doubt the deposits were for the full cost, right?

“several X users claim”, they say for sources. Christ Almighty.