Damn, this makes me drool over an alternate universe where discord, slack, and teams are just competing irc clients. Unfortunately I can't imagine anything like that ever happening
IOW we're stuck with a decaying protocol ecosystem—for messaging, and everything else—until we outlaw surveillance capitalism, which we probably won't do. Email wouldn't be able to take off if it were invented today, because it lets you use it without one company seeing everything. The state of things is really bad. It's a drag on productivity, with endless wheel-reinventing and deliberately-bad interoperability.
The success of slack and the failure of IRC has nothing to do with surveillance capitalism.