I disagree with this. Chat is the kindling that you use to start larger conversational fires. 
Consider all the things you don’t have to worry about with chat:
- a topic title
- a topic at all (we can discuss anything)
- browsing a list of topics (everyone just posts in the general channel)
But, for example, something could come up in chat like
Hey me and my family just walked out of the movie The Batman because we didn’t like it
and I can now in Discourse, with a few clicks, launch a new topic, a structured discussion based off that chat message titled
What movies have you walked out of?
with a description in the first post clarifying (you paid your own money to see it, etc), because to me it is fascinating the times when you’ve paid your own money to see a movie, and still decide that the movie is so bad it’s not worth your time to even sit through what you paid for and thought you wanted to see…
Well, no… annotation systems fail for a reason. Nobody wants to read annotation systems:
They want to belong to meaningful communities, but a bunch of comments (or annotations) slapped on a page isn’t a community. It’s a bunch of drive-by strafing where the angriest people are most incentivized to post.
We’re talking about systems of building communities, and checking their health and pulse. You’re right to be concerned; concerned is why I started Discourse. This may be an instructive article: