[einpoklum]

The situation had not improved much for the 10-15 years at least after that post was authored (which is when I was actively publishing).

But - writers could, then, and can now, use the "standard trick" to get past IEEE copyright transfer requirements:

https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/119002/7319

that works for a person who actually holds copyrights and can trasfer them - so that IEEE gets its papers, and eventually the author regains the right to also publish, modify, distribute etc. their paper.

For public domain it could be a bit trickier, and would require looking at the text of the current IEEE forms. I would guess that an appropriate loophole can be found to achieve a similar result.