Oikarinen attributes the decline in IRC to a trend of commercialization on the Internet.
“Companies want to bring users to their walled gardens,” he says, to ”keep the user’s profiles locked there and not make it easy for users to leave the garden and take their data with them.”
IRC’s distributed nature does not fit with the walled garden approach, says Oikarinen. So instead of supporting open communication tools like IRC, companies invest money in making their own solutions, he claims.
https://royal.pingdom.com/irc-is-dead-long-live-irc/