I always feel like IRC is a few protocol extensions and a few clients away from being relevant again.
/me goes back to Freenode
There are exceptions, like OFTC, but merely waltzing into the wrong place on EFnet these days is enough to get 10+ Gbit of UDP traffic directed at your IP address. I used to be fairly okay bouncing on a vhost, but now even the 12-year-olds have enough traffic to knock over a 40 Gbit port channel. An increasing number of datacenters are just filtering 6667. I'm on board with that.
Seriously, let IRC relegate itself to the dark corners of the Internet on shitty hosts and stay there, IMO.
The brute force ddos attacks I've seen are on illegal private server emulators and Minecraft et al. Maybe this is just a completely different experience by being in differnt part of internet.