I used to spend a lot of time on IRC back in the day. The only thing stopping me from using now, is I can’t find a decent IRC client for iPad. The big problem was around multitasking. I would say switch over to my mail app to read a message that just came in, and when I would switch back to the IRC app I would find myself disconnected from the server.
I do remember reading about a web based IRC client that would solve that problem. I was going to set it up in my home server, then got busy and forgot its name.
I’m new to the fediverse. My biggest gripe about big social media, is that the signal to noise ratio (SNR) is very low. My hope is that since this isn’t a solution for the folks you mentioned, that the SNR will be much higher here.