The forum was built to be a feature request tracker. It's used extensively for that purpose at Github (see e.g. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/categories/cod...). It's the main usecase for the forum (with a secondary use-case being stack-overflow-like q&a). I don't think anybody is hacking anything

> The forum was built to be a feature request tracker.

It was explicitly built to not be a tracker, but a discussion platform. The documentation describes them thus: "Discussions are for conversations that need to be transparent and accessible but do not need to be tracked on a project board and are not related to code, unlike GitHub Issues."

Thus, once a discussion needs to be tracked or linked to code changes, an issue is required. I'm in favor of providing more tools to orgnizations, but in practice I see very few to none of the projects that I depend on or interface with that actually use github discussions (I presume that is because so many discussions eventually need to be tracked or linked to code changes.)

> It's used extensively for that purpose at Github

Yet, when I look at the Discussions discussion, it's full of random junk, much of which looks like poorly written bug reports.