When trying to catch up with chat, while people are having a discussion, the auto-scroll-to-the-bottom functionality makes it hard to get yourself caught up on the day's discussion. I would think that the best way to solve for it is that if the user is already at the bottom/most recent of existing chats, auto-scroll is enabled. If they are anywhere else, you get something like in Zoom or Google Chat saying "more messages below" which would scroll you all the way to the latest upon clicking that.
