Those are fair critiques to be sure, but also precisely why my circles find utility in it.

Most of my IRC users hate the persistent records of modern chat systems and their persistent “always-online” functional designs. They want to be able to log off on their terms and not have a session follow them around, which IRC respects. For those who want rich rendering for media, they can choose a client that does that rather than have it forced upon them by default in Discord or Slack.

Same deal with sharing images: why shoehorn it into IRC when we have copyparty right there? It’s faster, easier, and entirely ephemeral - just like IRC is configured on the server side.

The point isn’t a “do everything” software or platform so much as a “do what we need so we can go live life doing what we want” setup.