There are a lot of things you can survive without :)) They are still nice to have though.
But I understand the privacy concerns, I struggle with the tradeoffs myself. But to me it’s worth it it this case since the database is supposed to be encrypted with a passphrase and stored locally, not sent over a network.
Other examples would include searching through history to check if you’ve talked to someone about something. Or check their answer. Unless you are someone with perfect memory I would think these are common situations.
Same, I can recommend vesktop to at least have a dedicated window for it, + some customization. I used discord-sandboxed before, but that stopped working.