Other than backwards compatibility with previous IRC clients, is there anything IRCv3 brings that something like Matrix doesn't do? Despite myself being a pretty prolific EFnet'er 15-20 years ago, most of the world has moved from IRC and I question the value of splitting resources across too many different efforts, when I think we'd be better off if everyone adopting a federated protocol like Matrix; which I believe covers pretty much all of the IRC use cases in addition to a number of others.

Whoa... I just found out about this

Will it require a user to set up a bouncer for chat history etc, or will it work seamlessly?

Not sure if that project will go anywhere, it doesn’t seem like it from the GitHub. Though from the people I’ve talked to, they like IRC because it’s simple without things like reactions and etc.