That's the individual server, not a standard Discord policy. Subreddits can also make gates that are exclusionary. So... not Discord the company.
Even if it was, "Requires a verified phone number" is not "Evil". You might not like it, it might be incomprehensible, it might be exclusionary, but it's not "Evil".
I use an adblock, so I don't see any ads on Reddit.
> I can't think of any way to look at this where Reddit is the lesser evil.
Reddit is the lesser evil for my personal use case because more and more Discord servers require a verified phone number to send messages. I can't get help if I can't send a message.