I use it every day, and I use it for work, admittedly its not freenode but an internal server. I find IRC great for not having the focus of the general masses because of how disappointing the general masses really are.
I'm not OP but how he phrase it isn't about dead to you, but dead in a "commercial" sense.
There was no value behind Freenode, except for the community itself (you), and it makes no sense for Andrew Lee to buy it, except for the name.
There was never a commercial sense to IRC. In fact this is one of the things I really love about it. It's so cheap to run it can be run entirely for free by some enthusiasts. Some sponsors too, sure, but the costs of running it are never huge.
It's technically far inferior to anything including the ones you can self host.
I don't understand why people don't migrate even if it means they don't like commercial alternatives like Discord.
This depends heavily on just what you value for determining "superior" and "inferior."
IRC takes, as a first order estimate compared to most other options, no resources.
It uses almost no RAM on the server side, almost no CPU on the server side, almost no bandwidth, and has actual native clients on just about any platform out there that also use no resources. It's trivial to host small interest-based IRC servers that people can join freely without registration.
Compared to most other platforms, which require fairly heavy servers to host (Matrix struggles with less than a gig of RAM if anyone joins large rooms) and use utterly absurd clients (hundreds of meg of download, many hundreds of meg of RAM to run), it's a nice breath of fresh air in the chat world. It's clean, simple, text based chat in a registration free form (mostly - larger networks do tend to require nickserv registrations).
If you don't care about any of that, OK, that's fine. If all you're doing is looking at the feature lists, sure, it's "inferior." But in terms of utility value on very limited resource uses (which I still care about greatly, and have done extensive work on making Raspberry Pis into quite usable little desktops), IRC still holds up amazingly well. Matrix lags on a Pi4. Discord... I'm not actually sure the client builds and the web app is heavy. IRC is light and crispy, just as it's been on everything I've used it on back down to a 486.
Also... that it's mostly an obscure backwaters means that it filters for the sort of people who like those things, which means that, especially on small little niche servers and very focused channels on larger servers, the signal to noise ratio is through the roof - there is an insane density of skilled people, far more than you'll find any other places I've looked. Having instant access to what often is quite literally hundreds of years of relevant experience in a field, at the tip of your fingers, is amazing.
The ability to just drop in, ask a few questions and log out is great.
If I join a even a medium sized Discord server, I suddenly get tons of notifications unless I manually change the settings for the server (God knows why discord hasn't set up a user side default setting for that)
Also, a lot of communities grew in and around IRC chats, which means a lot of people with the habit. With the usual Relevant XKCD [2]
It's not in discords interest to do so. More notifications leads to more user activity which leads to more VC money (and indirectly to more nitro income if users who would have forgotten about the service get drawn back in and eventually convert).
An open protocol allows decoupling the client and service provider which defuses these misaligned incentives, which is likely one reason this current wave of messaging services are against ilthem.
IRC doesn't need to do that. It just does what it needs to do without all the BS.
No voice, no proper file transfer and can't even see messages when you're offline meaning there's no reliable way of mobile notification means it's just getting too old.
