I always found the ephemeral nature of IRC chat to be a feature, not a bug.
But I think it is more complicated, because it also makes clear that IRC is not an ideal medium for many forms of messaging. It works great for free for all chat, where the discussion happens right now. But it is not great for group chats with friends or when information needs to be disseminated across a community, but I have both of these seen used often.
It just not asynchronous, while at the same time, because of the constant open connection, also not great to use on the go.
It's somehow nice to have a medium for "right here and now", but it sucks to not be able to answer a question or miss important conversation because you didn't look for 10 minutes.
Of course, multi-tier conversation options have helped traditionally, but I think that's also why i never bothered with IRC much, because it was always 3 dozen people idling who always seemed to burst in conversation once you got disconnected.
I wrote a little bit about this facet of IRC culture in this article:
https://drewdevault.com/2021/11/24/A-philosophy-for-instant-...
Back in the day where people used to differentiate between IRC and IMs (more importantly, chat vs messaging), I don't really think this is correct. In today's era of Discord/Slack/SMS though, it certainly would seem like a detriment. I do agree with those other people, though. What was nice about IRC (to me) was how imperative it was. You could post a cool thing, question or discussion topic in a channel and have responses coming through within the minute. When you're done, you just close the window and it's like it was never there. I remember feeling like I was using a secret spy communicator when I had IRC downloaded in middle school, the whole ephemeral nature of it was the coolest to me back then.
If someone is looking for an ephemeral side-project to work on, it'd be interesting to have something like twitter that works in a similar way: you only see tweets posted when you're online on the page.
On the other hand, the mobile/cellular world has been largely responsible for killing off IRC.
UnrealIRCd (a popular IRC server implementation) have actively refused to add features in to the code-base that allow IRC operators to snoop on private messages or covertly on channels, for example.
Slack, Facebook, Reddit, and whoever else we all use these days, keep every private message ever sent logged for all time and this is just accepted.
That's really moot because operators can certainly and easily snoop the traffic on the wire. Therefore I agree with the statement above that one should take IRC for what it is: lightweight, convenient, but don't assume any privacy - and it can be perfectly fine.
Someone should have told Angrywolf. This module was on every "we used to be on BigNet but we split off because reasons" UnrealIRCd network for a while, haha
(disclaimer: don't use it for moral reasons, but also because I've not vetted the code in any way beyond checking it looks a bit like code)