I'm happy IRC is dying, because it's a giant attack surface. As a hosting provider sysadmin, dealing with IRC servers was among the absolute worst parts of my job -- mitigating DDoS attacks against them, extensive hacking attempts directed at their infrastructure and later, mine, when they couldn't get in, credit card fraud associated with the accounts, IRC networks designed specifically for command and control of botnets and trafficking in child pornography, FBI raids against said networks we hadn't yet discovered...

There are exceptions, like OFTC, but merely waltzing into the wrong place on EFnet these days is enough to get 10+ Gbit of UDP traffic directed at your IP address. I used to be fairly okay bouncing on a vhost, but now even the 12-year-olds have enough traffic to knock over a 40 Gbit port channel. An increasing number of datacenters are just filtering 6667. I'm on board with that.

Seriously, let IRC relegate itself to the dark corners of the Internet on shitty hosts and stay there, IMO.

From my experience I haven't seen anything like this in the last few years. Botnets are controlled primarily from C&C web services or other SSL/TLS (+encrypted messages) transport via web.

The brute force ddos attacks I've seen are on illegal private server emulators and Minecraft et al. Maybe this is just a completely different experience by being in differnt part of internet.

This does not sound related to IRC at all. It sounds related to a specific network and unintended target audience. This in no way would affect a corporation or organization that decided to use IRC. You can determine on your own IRC who is authorized to connect, make channels, etc.

I wonder if this is an argument against IRC, or just against EFNet.

I think IRCCloud has a UI significantly better than Gitter. (Then again, I'm not a fan of Gitter's UI, at least as far as their desktop OS X client goes...)

The IRCv3 work group is making some good progress: http://ircv3.net/ .