Good point, connecting to a client or bouncer right on the server resolves this.

Yes, but then you need a client/bouncer which costs some sort of resource, whether it being your own computer, VPS or paid service.

It's not trivial to setup a bouncer for the new guy who's just worked out how to connect to IRC.

Other chat services effectively prove this true of a solution for the client logging in.

I learned a lot about how far matrix has come along and seems to have solved many of the swipes and gripes against irc.

> It's not trivial to setup a bouncer for the new guy who's just worked out how to connect to IRC.

As I recall, newbies often figured out how to do this pretty quickly, even before the recent trend of IaaS and free tiers. Shell accounts with bouncers were a quite common offering back in the day.

It also was not uncommon to have Friends help show you how to use irc. Maybe even in person.

I fail to see the value of expending time to configure extra services for functionality that I could get by downloading a client to another service that might not be ideal, but works enough to not care about.