(1) It requires so little computational power on the server or clients that it's a lot more environmentally friendly than some bloated pig of a modern chat "ecosystem." I can still use old hardware easily with it. And, unlike most of the new chat stuff, it runs on low power ARM boxes nicely.

(2) It's lasted 30 years, and the Lindy Effect would argue it will remain relevant far longer than any of the hip new platforms of the year.

(3) It's not centralized. Discord is centralized. Matrix is less centralized, but matrix.org is still pretty effectively centralized for most cases. IRC is distributed, has been so, remains so, and it's utterly trivial to start up new servers.

Clearly, you see no value in it. And that's fine. Plenty of people see value in it, and... as one of them, honestly, a lot of the new people who show up for 5 minutes and then leave when nobody answers instantly are pretty annoying anyway. There's several decades of established culture, and it's quite easy to find writeups on the proper way to interact with IRC, but a lot of people don't bother and get irritated and then leave. Fine.

You appear to be making a bit of a "Other systems are better because they're new!" sort of argument here, and not everyone shares that viewpoint.

But Element, running on a modern machine, is using almost a gig of RAM. Hexchat, running on an older Pi, connected to quite a few networks, has expanded to almost 100MB.