Debatable.
The IRC clients are mostly bad and ugly, and they don’t even implement basic formatting features (bold, italic) in the same way.
NickServ sucks.
Having to use bouncers to keep track of history sucks, this only makes it a non suitable choice for a chat platform today.
Does IRC even support long messages and multi line messages yet?
Oh and btw, net split is not acceptable today.
And considering multiline messages as "bloat" is a wild take to be honest.
No, thanks. If Discord were, you know, open source, The way I compiled it would strip those options out as well as any edits to pure ASCII Smileys.
Given that, Rich text support is not wanted. I would however like to be able to Share VIDEO Over RCS that's not so tiny.
Rich text might not take much bandwidth, but I'm focused right now on removing and DNS sink holing all unwanted packets. Tracking, adverts, etc.
So the little bandwidth it takes, yeah sure, but multiply that with everything else that's eating it, and it's another leak to remove.
IRC sucks, but it can be made more or less tolerable with things like IRCCloud or Lounge (or tmux+weehcat if you happen to prefer something like that), but AFAIK nothing can help with the poor performance and the unreliability of Matrix.
While Matrix developers have finally acknowledged the problems, they have run out of venture capital, and have hard time getting any funding to fix the protocol, clients and servers.
They might be ugly, but most are fast. It shouldn't take more than 0.1s to display a new tab or channel.