You say that like that's not an interesting observation. On the contrary -- that is a common observation that people frequently make about Coke in particular. It doesn't taste good, but people buy it anyway because it's Coke.
The actual form of the saying is something like "if every Coke factory burned down, Coke would be back in business the next day. If you hit every Coke customer on the head, Coke would be out of business the next day". (The idea being that if Coke's customers all forgot they were Coke customers, Coca-Cola wouldn't be able to grow a new customer base on the strength of their product.)
Coke was a business success because they're probably the best-tasting cola when you've already drank at least half of a can.
Lots of other soda makers, especially the bargain-bin "generic store brand" stuff, taste pretty gross after a can or two, by comparison. Pepsi's alright in that department, but this is a huge market differentiator for Coke.
I never said it was profound, in fact, I said it was obvious. I called it a "trivial observation" - but it matters if you don't realize it. The Discord software isn't being bought and isn't worth 10 billion, probably not even 1 billion, but rather the totality of what Discord is (brand, users, data, etc).
That's called brand and in one way or the other, in postindustrialized societies most people seem to work in that field (e.g. everything that is funded by ads is effectively part of the supply chain).
"The value is in the user base" is just a particularly sticky form of brand, nothing else, set least as long as there are no long term contracts involved. It's not in knowing their logs, it's not in having their authentication hashes, it's not even in exclusivity (I believe that most users of anything in the wildly overlapping spectrum from chat to instance messenger to screen sharing conference call are active on quite a lot of offerings)
