I've been away from IRC drama for so long. The idea of people fighting over IRC channels, trying to strongarm maintain ownership of them is just so cringeworthy now (nuking channels that advertise an alternative network, holy hell). Sad little king of a sad little hill.
It's no different than any other similar drama, when ownership and control of a shared resource is contested.
You may find IRC channel dramas silly, but I used to run a Hackerspace that (back then) communicated mostly via IRC, on Freenode, and I'd be really pissed if I saw this happening then. Conversely, I find similar dramas over Instagram or Twitter handles silly, but that's because I have no attachment to these services.
And structurally, when a bunch of executives get into a dispute over company ownership, from the outside it often looks just as sad and silly as this IRC drama - except with more money at stake. But again, for some people on the inside, it's personal.
This whole drama. Sudden mass resignation of volunteer stuff, corporate interest assuming direct control. We'd likely leave Freenode immediately, and... most likely migrate to one of SaaS chats. A lot of people in the community didn't like IRC and wanted to use something more mainstream. I was one of those arguing for staying on IRC, and the argument was much easier when status quo was a Freenode channel.
I suspect quite a lot of IRC communities exist only because staying is easier than switching, and if you disrupt their channel, they'll end up fracturing and migrating to Discord or Telegram or some other corporate network.
Admins/Operators taking over legitimate channels and removing migration references to allegedly capture and unknowing audience doesn't seem like a "ceingeworthy" issue. The popularity/coolness of the medium shouldn't matter.
