IRC and being ASCII only had their benefits. These days, Discord displacing IRC, for most people who even have PCs, there is a much different vibe of re-posting meme pics and gifs, or even youtube videos.
Yet, I don't know if this is because of the higher production requirements, or not, but there isn't a database of spontaneous funny moments.
Combined with "compact" mode in user settings, I find myself having a vaguely IRC-like experience in the servers worth participating in.
Terrible shame how many of us have come full circle just to do the same things on the corpo's surveillance state owned land instead of our own.
I still use IRC every day and you can send unicode emoji, Japanese, etc. just fine (via external tools or copy/paste typically). It's up to the client/terminal emulator/font on the other end to make it look right. Plus posting links to images/videos, either at random public spots or ones you just uploaded to a filesharing site, is pretty common.
I have only been to bash.org a handful of times, but multiple channels I'm in have their own bots that can store quotes and spit them back out later, so it's a bit more small and local than bash.org. It's only for single-line messages, though, so not the same as capturing a whole conversation. I do also occasionally grab some lines to dump in a text file for personal enjoyment.
Somehow, in the age of TikTok and Discord, ASCII art has survived
<insert amogus ASCII art here>