18 years and counting! Still living in IRC. I use the old and humble Irssi as the client with ZNC running on a Debian VM on Linode as the bouncer to maintain a persistent connection.

It is simple, reliable, and well established. I initially used to hang out on multiple networks like DALnet, EFnet, etc. but I quickly settled on becoming a regular at Freenode and OFTC because those are where most of the free and open source software communities were active.

The biggest recent event in IRC that happened recently from my perspective (user perspective) was the controversial change in ownership of Freenode. I switched to Libera like everyone else. The migration took only about 30 minutes or so: point my ZNC to the new server, register my nick, register my channels, and done!