rasengan (author of this post) bought the network for money (it's not clear what he actually bought, but he has enough lawyers to intimidate the other volunteers for whatever he wanted). He basically decided it was his way or the highway, and his way included rules like "thou shalt not leave freenode for another network" which of course made everyone immediately leave freenode for another network because nobody wants to be using a vendor that tries to prevent you from leaving.

This BBS thing seems to demonstrate it pretty well actually. Was anyone asking for freenode to have a hacker news clone? Don't think so. Is it even useful? Remains to be seen. Will it stay? Nobody knows. All we know for now is freenode is now the host for whatever rasengan feels like at the moment. Again, it seems that people don't really want to be on that kind of platform.

rasengan took it over, fucked up multiple times since, basically. This is why Libera is what freenode was, and the current freenode is just rasengan's.