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For a long time basically anything of relevance happened on freenode.Much did, yes, and when Freenode went belly up for insane reasons, everyone active moved their channels over to "What is it? Not Freenode! What's it like? Freenode!" and life went on as normal, because it doesn't take much to host IRC, and there's not much friction to move over.
But there are also an awful lot of quiet little backwaters IRC servers, with a few dozen users or less, floating around the internet - and that's where some of the most interesting content on the internet lives. You can host them on almost nothing (I ran an IRC network in college on a couple Mac SE/30s - yes, 16MHz CPU, 12-16MB RAM), and if the link to them goes down for a few hours, well, doesn't seem to bother anyone, you just wait for your client to rejoin.
As for why people are hung up over IRC? I can't speak for others, but as a long time IRC user who still uses it:
- Native clients for everything that aren't a hot mess of Electron, because IRC predates that. I don't need a high end modern system to connect to IRC, I can connect from a terminal, from a gutless wonder, from an old [whatever] system, etc. xchat/hexchat/(is mIRC still a thing?) just don't take much memory or CPU.
- It requires almost no bandwidth to connect. If you're on a crappy connection, IRC will work just fine. Not all of us live on high bandwidth gigabit fiber.
- It's not constantly changing. It does what it does, does it well, and pretty much hasn't changed meaningfully in 20+ years. It's stable, and I don't have to worry about some company suddenly deciding they need to growth hack and adding Javascript confetti or whatever to try and excite me into doing some action more.
- Most importantly, it's filled with the sort of people who value these things. It's a good filter for technically minded people who aren't up to their necks in the latest consumer electronics nonsense. I like talking to those people, as I'm one of them.