This is the equivalent from less than scratch. Worse than from the beginning. In the beginning they didn't have a pissed off community and weeks of bad will.
Indeed. Who is the plausible user base for Freenode at this point? It's unlikely that IRC will ever be able peel users away from Discord/Slack, no matter what improvements Freenode makes. Meanwhile, anyone already using IRC is probably aware of this drama and will stay well away from Freenode.
The past few years have shown that if you say "Free speech!" and "Cancel culture!" and "Blockchain!" loud enough, you'll get an audience, no need for any substance behind it -
and the more dramatic your actions, the more they'll follow you, with little regard to whether those actions make any sense.
Basically. There's a small community of IRC. That small community is now going to have a large portion that says "freenode is a nogo". What's the realistic community remaining in freenode? Who's going to donate? invest?
I'm an outsider and wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.