What is the allure of Discourse?

I’ve found a lot of sites switching their forums and chat to DIscourse. I don’t like it, and to come out as a curmudgeon, I don’t like most of the recent GUI changes that have been happening in the past few years with most softwares.

What is the allure of Discourse? Why are people moving to this vs the older forums that had boards, subboards, and posts?

From my perspective:
The GUI gets in the way.
I don’t like the dual pane posting tool
Is backwards (why am I typing at the bottom of the screen?)
Has too many popups and animations
Has very little manual search capabilities
Doesn’t work at all without javascript enabled
Adds too many game-y elements from the SE’s
Has very little whitespace, so I can’t click somewher to activate the window to scroll

I do enjoy the UI on the various SEs, and the creator of Discourse was one of the founders of SO and it’s derivative SEs, so it’s not like I’m an actual curmudgeon that doesn’t like change. But people seem to be going gaga over this and I don’t understand why.