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.