I use it occasionally. The problem is, most of my communities are on Discord. Plus, rooms not being permanent on the server means that bots have to be hosted by someone, plus there's a severe lack of effective logging.

Basically, all the problems that later chat programs solve, I keep missing on IRC. I want persistent rooms. I want federation & bridging between servers. I need trustworthy remote logs. Since I know a lot of that has been handled client-side, I don't understand why it can't be implemented server-side with IRCv4 or whatever is next.