As for the situation, if I understand correctly:
- Andrew Lee unexpectedly transferred control of the domain names without telling the community of maintainers who actually volunteer, unpaid, to keep the relay servers running.
- The maintainers perceived the company that now held the domain names as "sketchy." Andrew is the director of the company but it looked like its corporate filing status was out-of-date or something.
- In a damage control chat, Lee explained that the domain names were transferred because someone at the sketchy company had a plan to "decentralize ownership of the domain name" (which sounds kind of ridiculous up-front?). Lee also made references to proposals he'd never proposed to those folks which documented the transfer, and other such things... there was apparently also some reference to Freenode costing "millions of dollars" which the maintainers did not appreciate -- responses with the emotional tone of "you mean our donated compute and time that we don't get paid for is costing you millions? how?? and if not, how dare you complain that the main burden is on you rather than on us?"
- And part of the problem is that Lee isn't, you know, a peer of these volunteers running his own Freenode server and having conversations with them on a daily basis, so he came across as a domineering outsider.
For these reasons it looks like the volunteers have basically decided to flee the one domain name and start up a separate one, in the hopes that the users get the message and head on over to the new domain.