Alleged crown prince of the Joseon Empire. Which hasn't existed for ~110 years, and is based on an ennoblement by one of several contenders for the current head of the former imperial family, so it's an even weaker claim than most pretenders of former monarchies have.
First off, I am not affiliated with freenode or libera. I am just an unrelated guy who happens to use IRC. I am not offering any money to anyone for any IRC related things.
Secondly, you claimed that it is not possible to buy communities or goodwill. This does not match what I have witnessed in life. Communities get bought all the time, e.g. Facebook buying Instagram. Goodwill also gets bought all the time, often by making a giant donation and then running a giant PR campaign to let everyone know about the good deed. Distributed organic communities like freenode aren't immune to this, as I showed by pointing out that I, a long time freenode user, would be willing to accept payment.
This is false. Communities get sold successfully all the time (thing of tech giants buying up unicorns or whatever). But doing that with a (predominantly) FOSS community was definitely doomed from the start.
It's less that the communities were FOSS than that it was built on a widely-implemented, stable, open protocol. Moving to a new server means everyone takes 30 seconds to add the new server and join the new channel, but keeps using the same client. Maybe you have to change a line of config on some bots and restart them. Done.
We see fewer of those developed now precisely because it forces providers (free or paid) to behave well or else be easily abandoned. Facebook, Twitter, Google, et c., do not want that, for obvious reasons.
Perhaps they have; you're just thinking of the wrong films. I keep wondering if this is a The Producers situation, with the caveat that I can't imagine this being as wildly successful as Springtime for Hitler. Frankly, they are running service so badly that I can't think of any reason other than purposeful sabotage.
Speaking from my own experience during my stint as a network admin on a national IRC network 2 decades ago, this fits the psychological profile of certain people I encountered quite well. No intent to sabotage is needed, various things about IRC just bring out the worst in some people, and my guess is that this mostly begins with the channel modes; socially acceptible privilege and power over fellow humans which can be had by networking with the channel owner.
At the network operator level, concurrent user numbers become an issue of pride, total registered user counts, total active accounts likewise...
The more people view the network as a worthy entity for itself instead of just a tool for communication, the worse it gets.
In this whole thing, one thing in particular is interesting to me since freenode was not just an IRC network, but an IRC network with a focus on FOSS projects: Freenode / rasengan seems to insinuate by his actions that a project does not have the right to choose an official realtime communication forum for itself; that it is freenode which brings the users to the project channel instead of the other way around.
The would-be empire is tightening its grip, and more & more channels are slipping through their fingers.