This website has dang. Slack has channel owners. Reddit has mods and admins. 4chan has janitors and admins. Flat forums had mods
IRC is the same as everything else. It's a fine thing to point out, it's just not unique to IRC in any way
This is all or nothing thinking. We could design centralized protocols that have, for example, voting. We could design centralized protocols that call together digital juries[1].
Yes there may be powerhungry mods at the very top. They might be able to throw the votes or what not. Abuse is possible on centralized systems. But there's so vastly much we could be trying, could be doing, to alter the gerontocratic imbalance of power, even on centralized systems.
The problem isn't that nobody has designed or created such a system: it's that they're not very popular.
This assertion would be more interesting if there were more visible attempts. I haven't found anything on github I can deploy to moderate a channel via any kind of public-governance or other models. Can you?
Personally, I think we've done very little experimentation, and the gerontocratic rulers we dwell under generally would prefer staying in tight control. You talk about popularity, but popular for who? Even if some kind of democratic governance gained mass popularity, how many mods would be willing to hand over their long held control over channels/sites?