Matrix has a long way to go to compete with IRC and XMPP... Godspeed.
Matrix is, for me, a replacement (or a slightly less annoying way) to handle "person to person and local group" communications. And the bridges beat having to run a bunch of other clients for Google Chat, Signal, etc. However, my goal there is to move people onto Matrix, and I've done a decent job of it so far in my circles.
IRC is "professional technical chatter during work hours," and I use it as such - as I've used it for the bulk of three decades at this point. There's some social stuff there, but it's mostly "deeply technical conversations in the sort of chat rooms filled with people there for the same reasons." It's very much been a bit of a superpower - build relationships in the right IRC servers and you have a massive "external brain" of relationships you can query for weird questions. I worked at a small IT shop for a while, and people eventually figured out the correlation between "An absolutely off the walls question" and "the clattery keyboard," when I started discussing the problem in IRC.
I don't want IRC to be Matrix, any more than I want to bridge "professional chat rooms" into my evening hours (which more and more are simply hard analog, offline, etc).
I don't like the modern internet, and I go out of my way to find workarounds. One of those, currently, is having a physical server colo'd locally to host my internet presence.
I question whether the Matrix team even wants to eclipse IRC. It probably won't earn them many beans.
IRC is "professional technical chatter during work hours," and I use it as such - as I've used it for the bulk of three decades at this point.
Indeed and the clients and servers certainly treat it as such. But remember that Matrix is a federated protocol... What if your employer also used it? Or if you wanted to participate in Nix or Rust or Mozilla discussions?
Certainly you wouldn't want to receive work/business/etc messages while off with your friends and family. Different device, different account on the device, different client on the account... Lots of options to get Matrix working for you in more than one way.
But the clients are so different compared to IRC. And there is no real home server for the FOSS world. Mozilla, Nix each run their own AIUI.
That is because matrix is federated and IRC simply is not.
There are plenty of "professional" development matrix rooms, the Fedora ones are an example of that. They often hold directions meetings etc and have their own bots for that there.
I was thinking of making a matrix to matrix bridge so I could do that but I never really got around to it.