Yeah, I really don't get how people feel like IRC is somehow the pinnacle of chat. Even if you think a lot of the features added by newer applications and protocols are unnecessary or even a negative, it's really hard to argue that IRC isn't a patchwork of incredible cruft built on top of something so barebones that it just did not survive contact with reality.
Plenty of techies love idealized versions of open protocols, even horrible ones like FTP.
Similar story for ubiquitous tools. Shell is a horrible tool with a few lucky features (pipes, focus on text) that's everywhere so it wins by default. And techies turn a blind eye to its million defects.
