There was over 5K chat messages here in the last 30 days per About - Discourse Meta. It’s just that the chat rooms are not for the main public that comes with support and feature requests.
And we had 10x that in our internal instance, where it’s our main sync comms tool 
It’s not a side gig at all, we have a full team dedicated to this full time. We recently launched Introducing chat threads!, and there are lots of cool features in the pipeline.