It's a text-based IRC client, I'm not sure there is much brand recognition to be concerned about.

I don't think it's not about brand recognition, it's simply about avoiding confusion (I myself thought it was about Chinese chat).

If that confusion doesn't affect the creators or target users, why break existing recognition with the effort of a name change?

The brand "WeChat" is not as well known as you might think. In China, it's known as 微信 (Weixin), and most people in China have never heard of the WeChat brand.

I also think it's an understatement to call Weixin as ubiquitous as Google in China. There are alternatives to basically every Google service. In China, many times there is no alternative to Weixin. 支付宝 (Alipay) is sometimes a substitute, but in many cases only Weixin is supported. Want to order food at a chain restaurant? Want to buy tickets for a museum? Want to choose the song at a Karaoke bar? Need to fill out a customs exit form? Weixin is often the only option.

Isn’t QQ similar?

Not quite as common or popular but similar.

QQ is made by the same company as WeChat. It was like the last gen IM, with a desktop focused application and an accompanying social media (QQ Space, so you know what the inspiration was). They are still used nowadays but in a much more niche.

By using the same logic then CNBC (1996) should change their logo because Huawei (2006) decided to copy it.

I’m guessing with West you refer to the ~1 billion people that live in Western Europe + USA + Canada + Australia.

I constantly see in Hacker news that people react to news of Asian countries (China in particular) as if the only other alternative is “The west”. Most of the world is neither China nor the West, why are we stuck in this dichotomy? Does the rest of the world not matter?

For this topic in particular, Google is ubiquitous in most of the world (The west, but also Latinamerica, Africa, many places in Asia), so it’s not a West phenomenon