Seems to still be chugging along. You can even join directly via their web-client: https://freenode.net.
Personally I still use pidgin.im to connect to all the relevant #freenode goodness. Seems people forget it still works and is pretty great even all these years later :).
Due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#Ownership_change_and_...
https://netsplit.de/channels/?net=Libera.Chat
There are some other nets listed on that site with somewhat lower usercounts:
IRC is for people to whom the word "content" sounds right out of Idiocracy. :)
I wouldn't go poking around IRC today looking for random passive content consumption. There's more of that pretty much everywhere else on the Internet.
Go to IRC, in a goal-directed way, if an open source project you use is OG enough to have an IRC channel (rather than a open source backsliding Discord) that you want to access.
If you're involved in IT incident response for a company, there is a chance that running a simple private IRC server that's entirely separate from all your other infrastructure is useful. You'll need to make sure ahead of time that everyone who needs to access it urgently, when everything else is blowing up, will be able to.
But it was introduced in its current sense (not in the protocol sense) by cynical and greedy exploiters, who spoiled much of the goodness of the Internet.
So when a random person casually says something like "consume content", unironically, it's like saying, "it's got what plants crave...".
I remember being a high school student and having an amazing physics conversation on IRC that included a description of Flatworld that really fascinated me.