What an L-ass take. Nobody is stating IRC is bad, but stating that it’s flawed for a entire swath applications (encrypted chat) & at that rate you could say e-mail & mailing lists are older & could serve the same purpose (see what DeltaChat is trying to do).

If you think folks should be forced into Apple or Google products just for instant messaging you are a goober since chat doesn’t require that level of lock-in (see IRC as you noted existing & working before phones). Some folks don’t even want phones for being annoyances or don’t like a series of monitoring radios/sensors on their person phoning home at all times & making them get one just to talk to you due to you not wanting to pick a platform with broader reach is a dick move. …& that’s without getting into the class issues of telling folks “just buy a smart phone” ̇

XMPP isn’t crushed either. It’s used massively in commercial applications, especially in the video game industry that need… a presence & messaging protocol that is also extensible to their product needs. Extension & maintenance happens all the time from these applications opening up parts of their code bases for feedback/adoption. Has XMPP waned in personal usage post-Google’s dick move, sure, but it didn’t die & if anything has been gaining in popularity as folks look for chat alternatives with a large feature set & are self-hostable + decentralized to prevent lock-in--especially once they see how Matrix is too expensive to run.