Dev here. Just replying to the subject line.
I think it would be extremely unfair to say that IRC and Discord are empty.
Firstly, IRC and Discord are mirrored so the same chat appears in both.
I and the other devs are available most days and the community is also good at helping eachother out.
However, qtile is not a large community so responses are not instant
If I had to choose a place to go for support, I'd pick discord/IRC or GitHub above this mailing list. I don't check this list often and Gmail often marks these messages as spam!