It is ok if it never gets adopted as mainstream communication. But for the target audience (like opensource support communities being the target audience of Libera), it works quite well.
In my opinion, the main reason why it was never adopted as a mainstream platform, is because it was never picked up by a big corp that saw a way to earn money off of it.
Insert any modern chat app and random user can drop a screenshot there trivally, do some basic text formatting, and paste code in nicely colored blob of text, all from comfort of single login in a browser. And now even jump to voice chat or video conference directly from it.
They can also look at what they missed in channel by just scrolling up. Sending files just worked. You just got notifications without extra fuckery. Hell, you get digest with conversations you miss.
That's why modern closed down chat ecosystems won. Coz it's easy for "normies" to use.
Let's take other example, XMPP. It had all that but in network of XEPs that some clients/servers implemented, some not, some just not very well, and some being fucky to config. It wasn't just "login here and get every feature" like it is in modern chat clients.
It had it's one shining moment where both facebook and google offered XMPP way into their garden so you could have connectivity across federation and just have a single contact list but that didn't matter to non-nerds that just used facebook/google talk so once they decided to close their gardens any benefit of xmpp faded away.