I want to like IRC. Discord is great for gaming or chatting with friends and random people casually, but certain IRC channels tend to have extremely knowledgeable, helpful people you can't find much elsewhere. But IRC clients are just so frustrating. Just today I open the IRC client on my phone and the IP I'm currently assigned is banned from one server? I also tend to have random connection issues to certain servers and trying to Google errors messages shows me forum posts 15 years old that are vague and not helpful in diagnosing the issue.
If you can spare a few more minutes, hosting an IRC client on your own server would probably be the best choice. For example: ZNC (bouncer), WeeChat (relay -> app) or Quassel.
This is the great irony, isn't it? You want to escape Discord, because it's centralized, so you jump to a decentralized service, whose user experience sucks, so you sign up for another centralized service, just so you can use the decentralized service that was supposed to get you away from centralization in the first place.
That is why I literally said in my second paragraph that "hosting [...] your own server would probably be the best choice". Also, I was replying to somebody who complained about connection issues on his phone. He probably doesn't want to have a random timeouts when he travels from one place to another and potentionally miss important messages...
Furthermore, IRCCloud is not centralized in the same way as Discord is because you are not forced to use it. IRC is still an open protocol. For example Matrix has a big chunk of people using the official "centralized" Matrix server and the same is true for Mastodon with mastodon.social. Some prefer to self-host, others do not. I don't see the problem here. Gmail wasn't the downfall of email either.
Using a centralized IRC service like IRCCloud is an option, but not one I would opt for personally. There are also other options, ZNC and The Lounge both come to mind. You can self-host these or find an instance hosted by somebody else.
Self-hosted Matrix works fine and great. You can host either just a server, Riot (Element now), or both. You can then use any client you want with your server or any other.
If IRC had an objectively better user experience, objective usage numbers would show that. It has a better user experience /for you/ because it caters to the things that /you/ care about.
I'm not sure what pretending your preferences are objective standards is supposed to add to the conversation.
To be fair, most of those other communication protocols are running jokes outside of tech.