Basically they are trying to create engagement, which is a smart way of doing marketing. If you have thousands of people talking about chatting and promoting it for you, then y oud onto have to do your own marketing, those people will do it for you.
Plus when people chat, they are building friendships, not like real life buddy you have that you hang out, but online friendship in todays world is as real as it gets, we all have friends we talk to on telegram and discord, so if you can get people to chat here, they will get to know each other and be friendly and will want to come back here for them.
I have thought about the reason why projects incorporate chats in their platforms, but I could not have enough reasons than;
1. Building community: A company building reputation around a group of people is good.
2. Some issues that customer supports will resolve will be resolved even in the community chat
3. The relationship you talked about could be the least reason for the community chat
4. Another reason could be the fun in the chat could be attracting people to the platform to patronize it more
We from this community could have fun in the Bitz chat.