I think this is actually a good and deep point. I totally understand the goal of lowering the barrier. On the other hand there are people who are fluent in multiple languages and enjoy communicating in those. So they could use both Chinese and French and English. By blending everything into “my language” it actually kills the diversity, subtle cultural and language differences get hidden and no one is actually motivated to understand another culture anymore. It will result in even a bigger gap instead of connecting, like social networks did. It is actually very self-centric to get everything in my own language.
As I said I fully understand the motivation to have e.g. docs translated to multiple languages if the product is global. There are culprits though even there, as someone else pointed out, it brings other problems. Like that we, Discourse localizers, choose very specific terms sometimes that AI can never guess. So it never ends up with a good translation out of the box. But that can be trained, I suppose.
So my point is — maybe there should be more options. Something that actually helps to spread the product and lower the barriers but does not cripple our intelligence and potential. Of course it might happen that I switch to Czech if supported here and never even consider you all speak different languages. But honestly, I love knowing what different cultures you are and that we all are somehow trying to understand each other conscientiously by choosing a common language.
I guess this is what the OP had in his mind.
Hard product choices. But I believe in Discourse team’s deep values and creativity to solve this 