Otherwise I just don't have time/energy/money to get a server just to host my IRC session.
I think that there is a lot of people in your situation. They don't know about the existence of this tools or think their setup is hard or time consuming and ends using Slack.
I ended up installing Quassel with a docker image and downloading a Quassel client for my laptop and smartphone. I hear it's possible to connect to Quassel (and other bouncers?) with regular IRC clients, too, but I can't be arsed to figure out how.
This is a really strange comment. If the question is "How do I get always-on IRC" then the answer is "Use a bouncer". Following up with "People don't want to learn about a bouncer" is the same thing as "People don't really want the answer". I'm confused.
How is "Install ZNC" (as an example of a bouncer) not "actionable"?
Connecting to multiple networks with a bouncer has always felt like a kludgey disaster to me because of this. I don't want to have to define another connection from each of my actual clients to my bouncer to add another network, I just want to add another network. When I get a new system or reinstall an old one I don't want to have to set up a half dozen connections.
Quassel gets this right and keeps things separated. All IRC network settings exist at the server (bouncer) only, the client needs nothing more than a username and a password for the server and gets everything else from there.
These are not enormous barriers but they were enough to put me off of setting up Quassel on a VPS for a few years. Now that I've done it I don't want to go back, of course, and I don't see it as a huge chore to do it again. But that's what's making it "not actionable" - the perception that this is going to end in a nightmare of configuration files and Stack Overflow searches.
Currently, though, we have to tell users who want that to use IRCCloud instead - about half of the people come back after the first week of free usage of IRCCloud when it asks you to pay, and start using Quassel from then on.