IRC is forever tainted by graybeards that won't give up their terminal clients. People who want to get work done have moved on. The next generation of developers have no interest in IRC. It's a dead end.
I think you misunderstand the real quality of running an IRC client from anywhere on anything. I don't need to carry around a $4000 laptop to get my work done when I can use my home dev server from anywhere using a 10-year old Thinkpad junker. Break it? Pitch it and buy another for less than $100 on ebay.
The bigger point is that 'text chat' is antiquated and unnecessarily limited, and that the advent of "richer" text chat is a gigantic improvement in communications efficiency.
As one of these greybeards who started with 300 baud modems and text chats in the 80's, and moved onto IRC because the internet was better than BBS's, I wholeheartedly endorse the idea that the only people clinging to the UX garbagefire that is IRC are the people who are either unwilling or unable to adapt to the new reality that modern services offer so much more value than IRC will ever be capable of.