I've been using IRC on and off for three decades, now. It will never be what it was, so don't expect much. Most of channels are kept alive by bots and otherwise idling accounts like mine that drop into the background of our desktop and get forgotten about for days, sometimes weeks at a time. The political channels on a few servers are, of course, active but you'll not find any useful discourse there since it's all being driven by conservative and liberal zealots. I assume they are not what you meant by "cool people."

Whatever cool people there were have either died or saw the writing on the wall as IRC slowly faded into obscurity with the introduction of better (debatable) chat systems, especially these days with things like Discord or Slack that do every IRC does in some capacity and more, perhaps most importantly simply making chat accessible in a safe way to less technically savvy users. That genie is kinda out of the bottle, so getting anyone aside from grumpy old guard to use IRC versus the modern alternatives is pretty much impossible. As a result, and aside from the bots doing things like letting me play IdleRPG or whatever, you're more likely to encounter people like me who don't feel like we fit in anywhere or conspiracy theorists, returning to IRC the way Romero's zombies wandered to the shopping mall because they had a vague memory of it from a former life.