Yeah I'm well aware, it's just that for all purposes except when thinking about data privacy etc., IRC is dominated by slack and even discord. Yeah, there are some curmudgeons who'll say "But I can't use discord from a shell!" or whatever, but that's not really meaningful
Actually, even if you don't have an IRC client you can right now just telnet to irc.freenode.com port 6667 and enter a couple of commands to join a channel and see the discussion: http://protofusion.org/wordpress/2009/08/irc-via-telnet/
The fact that IRC is an open protocol is of course what makes it "non-trending". You can't easily monetize from IRC and you can't hide the data of IRC behind closed gardens. Everything is there in the open.