Earlier quoted context omitted.
The massive nuance you are missing is that IRC had a default expectation of being ephemeral in nature. Sure you might use IRC for chatting and have some bots around that - but typically your long term storage of information would have been handled in something like a forum, website, email list, file repository, etc - so that even if an individual IRC server went down it wasn't a big deal to move along. IRC was/is les…
> The massive nuance you are missing is that IRC had a default expectation of being ephemeral in nature. Bouncers and log bots have been a thing even 20 years ago when I was active on Freenode. In fact, a bouncer and log bot was what made me get my very first own VPS... time flies. It lasted a year until my first attempt at a libc upgrade failed, that was a lot of work to fix.
Being able to get a text file log dump easily is also light years ahead of what most people are able to do on discord.
In order to get log bots or bouncers up and running it required some technical know how (meaning most people didn't do it, thus staying ephemeral as default) but those that did do it were well aware how to get and export those log files for archiving etc (thus why we have things like bash.org).
On Discord it's default and while yes someone could setup bots or something to export some of the content - that requires some technical know how (meaning most people won't do it). Thus everything in there goes away when the service closes.... even though the DEFAULT EXPECTATION is that information there is forever.