[wdutch]

I think IRC will always have a place in certain communities.

I drop into IRC whenever I need help with an Arduino project or want to catchup with old colleagues. From my own personal experience, all the open source communities I get involved with use IRC and I have never known one use Matrix, sometimes this is for personal reasons and sometimes for work. This probably depends on what techie circles you move in.

I've also noticed IRC is more popular in certain countries. Anecdotally Brazil and Sweden seem to have fairly large communities of nontechnical people on IRC.

Maybe for some people, IRC does what they want and they don't need any updated spec.