Coincidentally I had to use IRC today, not much changed. Biggest hurdle continues to be messages when I'm away and it seems IRCCloud hasn't seen an update in a while.
I've been using ZNC for several years now. It definitely feels a little janky and weird to set up, but once it's working it's virtually maintenance-free. I run it on a cheap Debian VPS at Hetzner.
t2.micro AWS instance + irssi and tmux. Problem solved.
For some reason I always used `screen` and never considered alternatives, it's just how I learned to use irssi.