Unless you're baking 3+ times a week, it doesn't make sense to keep a constant fresh culture. This is the biggest deterrent to many people getting into it, in fact.
If you want to bake occasionally, you can just refeed after using a portion, letting revitalize to between 70% and peak and tossing in the fridge for 1-2 weeks.
Also, as a side addendum, if you're worried about using your culture at "peak strength", then just avoid the question altogether and just make an overnight preferment of some sort (sponge, poolish) from the culture.
Sure, and I've had lags of days, weeks, or even months in using starter. Too long and you risk mould formation, which I've recently dealt with.
In that case, I ended up starting over from some dried starter which has been sitting in the freezer since April 2020. A tablespoon of that with an otherwise typical feed (100g flour, 100g water), and about six feeds before the starter was back up to desired activity.
"Discard" is a term that's relative to your starter batch itself. There are recipes for discard, one of the simplest is a "starter pancake", which I realised was pretty much a crumpet, and indeed adding about 1/2 tsp salt and 1 tsp baking soda gives the bubbly form of a familiar crumpet. Fry in butter or oil in a small frying pan or using crumpet rings, about 5 minutes per side. To prepare for eating, toast about 3--4 minutes.
These may be eaten sweet (butter and jam) or savory (onions, eggs, tomatoes, etc.), as desired.
There are collections of starter discard recipes.
If you're only baking a few times weekly, storing your starter in the fridge is fine. For longer downtimes, I strongly recommend drying and freezing your starter once established. As I wrote elsewhere in this thread, make backups.
It's also possible to feed daily and store the discard for a weekly batch of discard-friendly recipes (crumpets, English Muffins, sourdough pancakes, and numerous others).
Also to clarify: creating a starter is different from maintaining one.
In the initial stage, your goal is to cultivate yeast in your source flour and/or environment (far more the former than the latter AFAIU), and have them reach a state where your starter is highly active 8--12 hours after a feeding or so. That requires frequent feeding, 1x to 2x daily, for a week or two.
Once you've achieved that goal, your starter becomes far lower maintenance, and typically requires feeding only prior to use and once a week or so as a maintenance process. (I've found I can feed less frequently than this, while refrigerating a sealed jar of starter, but you risk losing the whole batch.)
So, yes, you do need to go through a period of daily or twice-daily feedings initially. But you don't need to sustain that indefinitely.
And again as noted by others, the removeed "discard" starter left over after a feeding can itself be used for quick and simple baking recipes.
(When baking, that "discard" is the levain which you're adding to your dough or recipe.)
I make sourdough pancakes several times per week. This keeps my starter fresh. I don't measure, just an egg, a bit of oil (50-75ml) beat well then add starter until my bowel is around half full (500-600ml) and mix some more. Then disolve a couble scoups (10 ml) of baking soda in water (50-70ml) and mix in. Cook fast.
I use baking powder for this. It works about as well (although you need more of it), but it minimizes the risk of localized areas of too much baking soda, which tastes quite nasty.
If you want to bake occasionally, you can just refeed after using a portion, letting revitalize to between 70% and peak and tossing in the fridge for 1-2 weeks.
Also, as a side addendum, if you're worried about using your culture at "peak strength", then just avoid the question altogether and just make an overnight preferment of some sort (sponge, poolish) from the culture.