Some friends use it more reluctantly and only sign on occasionally when they need something. I remember one friend vaguely describing a "malaise" when using Element for the first time, like something about the UI/UX bugged him but he didn't really elaborate. I assume some of them are using other stuff like Discord on the side, but I'm not sure since I don't. I think there is also some minor friction with the whole Element vs Matrix naming thing (I hit this a lot with older family members), they wanna call it the app name because they're used to centralized stuff, I call it Matrix because it's more correct and also because I don't even use Element a lot of the time (I use nheko on my PC at least). I can't really bring myself to say "I sent you a message on Element". I wouldn't say "I sent you something on gmail" either. I don't know what the solution is for this, but I will say the Element branding feels a bit too strong at times, almost like it's hiding the fact that there are other clients and other homeservers than matrix.org.
The worst I see is from the broader tech community, though. Especially people from the fediverse, they seem to have a strong alignment with XMPP. IRC is still my favorite, personally, but it does seem like Matrix gets unfairly ragged on a bit. Both by the people who think XMPP already does everything Matrix does but better, and from the people who don't care about free software or decentralization and just want everything to be like Discord.
The worst I see is from the broader tech community, though. Especially people from the fediverse, they seem to have a strong alignment with XMPP. IRC is still my favorite, personally, but it does seem like Matrix gets unfairly ragged on a bit. Both by the people who think XMPP already does everything Matrix does but better, and from the people who don't care about free software or decentralization and just want everything to be like Discord.