My close friends and I have a Discord server that we interact on regularly and I've actually looked at switching us over to irc, since I like open, self-hostible standards with competing servers and clients better than proprietary software, but there were a couple reasons that the switch would be unsatisfying for us.
First, with Discord if you aren't online for awhile you don't have to miss the conversations that happened while you were offline — you can just read them later. Whereas with IRC, you will absolutely have to miss everything you are not online for, which creates a much larger fear of missing out, without any benefit in not being distracted or whatever since you can (and I do) just turn off all notifications that aren't direct pings in Discord so you can just check the app whenever you feel like it. So Discord has all the benefits of not getting notifications while you're offline, with none of the downsides of literally missing out on important discussions between your friends where they might have been pouring their heart out with no one currently on the server or whatever.
Second, Discord just has a lot more features that we actually really like using. Maybe that's "bloatware" to you, but the purpose of software is to have features users use. For instance, embedded images and gifs, custom emojis, the possibility of having voice channels and sharing your screen, and stuff like that. Having custom emojis is actually a pretty great way to expand your expressivity and have really fun in jokes and losing that is actually pretty sad.
Third, like the other commenters have said, the Discord servers for stuff I care about are actually active and friendly and interesting.
Finally, although you could make an IRC interface that works like the Discord app, which happens to be my favorite layout for a chat app that I've ever used, I don't think anyone has to my knowledge.
We ended up going with an open source clone of Discord called revolt, which I developed a custom Android application for.