I am not sure most users would agree with your assessment that IRC is easy. To many it is arcane.

If you created two Telegram alternatives, that was identical except for performance, would users not choose to use the most performant one?

Statistics like these (I just found at random, but there are many like it available) demonstrates that your average user do in fact care a lot about performance:

https://www.marketingdive.com/news/google-53-of-mobile-users...