I think we should revisit this… Seems like it is quite a popular request and it should be in core Discourse. For example, when creating a custom user field, there could be a toggle to make it a textfield or a textarea (with an optional character limit).
This could allow for rich data for an LLM to consume via a custom tool which runs a Data Explorer query
Indeed just visiting the user-custom-fields tag reveals how popular and important they are to communities.
I’d honestly be willing to just pay Discourse to add this to core