>On the IRC side you seem like a normal user as well.
Until you accidentally start using Matrix features that don't translate well.
Eg your matrix client will let you post large messages. On the IRC side this will generally appear as
foo[m] send a long message: <https://matrix.org/some/long/url/uNiQuEcOdE>
<foo[m]> How do I fix this?
and now IRC users have to open a browser to answer your question.
Also I've heard that if a Matrix user edits their message, the bridge resends the whole message to the IRC channel. I've not experienced Matrix users repeating themselves with tiny differences, so I can't confirm this.
Thankfully this is rare, at least in the channels I hang out in. But in general I have a dim view of all these protocols that attempt to interop with IRC - they all have some form of impedance mismatch that causes jank. The worst one was probably gitter, where its users were used to posting kilobytes of code in markdown code fences because the browser UI would collapse it by default so it'd look fine, but their IRC bridge sent the whole thing line-by-line to all clients. And if the gitter user edited that code block, the bridge would send the whole code block down again. I disconnected from that thing as soon as it happened to me (The fact that its IRC impl was broken and required me to patch my client was also part of the reason.)