I think Drew and Simon represent a good case for IRC modernisation _without_ it devolving into Slack or Discord. Notification fatigue, endless automated bots, and the expectation to read channel history _sucks_ and IRC keeps the opt-in liveness and culture that fosters jump-in and jump-out chats which is kind of how it works face-to-face in the real world anyway.

There are absolutely others doing good work here too but Simon and Drew are the most visible (to me).

With (good) forums non-existent now I spend almost all of my tech/programming/misc talking on IRC and have since 2011. I'm 27, this isn't technology for "boomers" or "die hard oldies" which is the general tone against "just use Discord or Slack" I see in response to any kind of IRC discussion online.