I use Discord regularly (and moderate a couple servers), but the experience has never been like IRC in the slightest. They're very much different platforms, and while I won't say that Discord is a bad platform per-se (beats Telegram groups), it certainly isn't the next incarnation of IRC in any sense. A more apt comparison might be calling Discord a fast-paced and immediate Reddit; a centralized service that promotes the illusion of different communities while ultimately serving to extract value from it's users.