Therefore I don't understand your sarcasm. What's the alternative? If you find Discord's search feature good, you could implement it on top of the text logs.

But the people who use logs won't use IRC, and the people who often miss out on important conversations because they are only casual users will not have logs. Casual users outnumber dedicated users - the lack of good logging is a real problem for them.

But, yeah, I understand this is beyond the capabilities of your typical user, and not something most users even know exists.

This is really a UI/UX deficiency of IRC, not a functional deficiency.

I have a hard time imagining irc heads don’t have a solution dockerized

Camfrog video chat has been around since the beginning '00s. You could put as many video feeds as you could fit on your screen, with 20-30FPS streams, and good sound quality. Granted, resolution was 352x288, but for seeing and talking, you don't really NEED much else.

Discord, meanwhile, can't keep a reliable WebRTC stream going.

Once every 5-10 years, I look through the logs I have that aren't on textfiles because the statute of limitations hasn't run out and relive a little of the history of how certain things came to be.

Those chats are an ethnography waiting to happen. You'll wish you had yours one day.

And some communities had it setup for you so it is not something that each user had to do.

Or use one of the public ones.