I moved to flatpack Discord because it comes with automatic updates and no update annoyances. It is indeed lower maintenance, but note that because of privacy constraints Flatpack does not permit Discord to view running applications.
flatpak is kinda a everything or nothing thing, if you want to use it you should probably really commit to it for the best experience, otherwise some of it's upsides turn into downsides.
I'm not a huge fan of it, but i like it as an ecosystem
Yeah, that shit is super annoying, it's been happening for years. I'm surprised they haven't turned it into a self contained updater or something by now. It's part of the reason I don't use it anymore.
You can get Vesktop from Flathub if you want. It's a third party client with extensions, themes, updates you can do whenever you want and better Linux support for screensharing.
Download the gerneric linux version. Then un-compress it and copy the contents into your system discord directory. Maybe make a back-up copy first, just in case.