I also used to be kinda terrified of Discord: the fact that the first few servers I joined (mostly fandom-related, nothing to do with comics or art) were full of drama and/or drama queens didn't help either time zones, English being not my first language and crowded servers with people having a thousand of different conversations at once made things even worse.
The Tapastry and Webtoon Canvas Discord did feel overwhelming at first (and during my first day on the WT Canvas server someone even downvoted my comic after I said something about the unfair rating system of the site, wheee ), buuuut... now that a bit of the excitement from the first few days has faded, I find things to be a lot more manageable, actually? Conversations seem to happen at a much slower rate now, and overall I find myself preferring the fact that there's more people, meaning that no matter what time I'm online, there will always be someone else there. I also couldn't help but feel like smaller servers tend to have this clique-y kind of attitude in which if you don't participate often, you're basically treated like an intruder when you eventually join in... unlike bigger servers, where keeping track of who posts what is much harder and people won't care if you're online once a week or 24/7.
I still don't take part to stuff like voice chat or screen sharing, though, and I definitely still prefer the slower pace of forums for more in-depth conversations... but I agree with @noenoh about getting used to it due to its similarities with IRC XD that said, it IS true that it took me a LONG time to find the necessary courage to jump into conversations at random, so I definitely agree that it takes a while to get used to D: