I do mentoring for LibreOffice and this year I've interviewed over 100 people on IRC and had over 200 further mentoring chats. Most have never used IRC before and KiwiIRC web chat seems to work fine as the first client.
But there is also IRCCloud, like I think it stands to support my initial point about it being omnipresent, which now makes me wonder if one of the main issues of IRC for many people is not just about the presence of choices