Earlier quoted context omitted.
IRC has pretty much always been free without ads. You make it sound unworkable when it's become so much easier to run over time. And tons of forums are in the same category. Also there isn't a way for people to pay their share of server cost for services like that. For your average non-video communication service your options are paying 0x or paying 50x.
IRC doesn't offer multi device, high availability log archives. IRC doesn't offer a lot things, actually. Fairly sure the standards don't offer persistent identity.
And some networks provide bouncers so they basically do have that. And maybe some IRCv3 networks, I haven't looked into that much lately.