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Depends on the channel, Mozilla's IRC has channels (like #deeplearning) with helpful people ready to hold your hand through using and extending Mozilla TTS & Mozilla DeepSpeech.

Most channels of open source projects seem very constructive and helpful to this day. I also like lurking on #xkcd. There are still some low traffic channels of traditional communities (you know, those running on their own domain with something like phpbb) where I've known people for ages and still frequently have conversations about nothing and everything.

It's just never been that discoverable as a standalone medium, like connecting to a server and then finding a good channel. That just doesn't happen.

The network certainly has something to do with it. EFNet seems to be full of trolls and is hard to have a legitimate conversation in, while much of Freenode is so focused that it’s hard to have a natural conversation without being berated for being off-topic. Snoonet seems to strike a reasonable medium and has the nicest people I’ve met out of any IRC network.