I think another good example of IRC usage was the channel for kimchi and its associated tools. It's a GUI for libvirtd but the interesting part is that they used to hold daily standups in IRC.

Just like we do today in Webex Teams for example.

I personally never liked the transition to web based chat because IRC was a lot more information dense than any web chat can be.

Being able to paste inline code doesn't sell it for me since there are pastebins you can host on prem easily.