I’m thinking a couple of features should be disabled.
Likes generally attracts people to farm internet points and are not necessarily a net positive on the forum. Badges are just nonsense for a technical community and the chat is IRC/Matrix already.
Anything else we should consider to look at?
I agree as to Likes and Badges. I would need to think about chat. I have nothing on which to form an opinion
Maybe we can also try the Post Voting plugin? It seems to allow some functionality similar to Stack Overflow.
Someone wanted to see if we could add the navbar at the top, so I did some manual mocking with the components to see if it was easy to add, and it was 
Even though badges and likes may seems useless at first thought, they are actually crucial to a healthy community.
Apart from likes, Discourse has a plugin called discourse-reactions, which allows using emoji to react to post, like in the photo below:
This helps others to quickly identify the usefulness of each post to the topic. Sometimes, instead of typing a few words to reply, it is handy to just click an emoji to ‘say something’.
Likewise, badges can reinforce positive user behaviors and easy for others to identify which users have contributed in the community.
In my personal experience, chat is useful when you want to talk with a specific forum user privately (Private Message is another way). For example, if someone is particularly bewildered by something or interested in some details, they can talk in private without making the main thread cluttered. Also there is no harm leaving chat functionality there as is.