For what it's worth, I'm in my 20s and love IRC. I do also use matrix and xmpp, but they aren't as fast and comfortable. I love how irc logs work. I have everything stored locally and can search it very quickly with grep. I'm always frustrated with the search of other things, both for being slow and for not finding what I know is there.

Stuff like multi-line posts and markdown are nice, but none of that is worth all the good stuff you lose from irc.