One (or some) of freenode staff did make it clear that freenode was a platform rather than exclusively an IRC network, which suggested that they may have had plans to look into alternative platforms in the future. And the Matrix-IRC bridge went to prove that Matrix usage is increasing, although I understand that there are a lot of people who still insist on IRC.

I'm not a huge fan of Matrix's current design or implementation, but I use it and I can understand why others do.