I don't think that's the right conclusion to draw at all from the Freenode debacle. A pretty significant amount of the channels stayed on Freenode after Andrew'

I don't think that's the right conclusion to draw at all from the Freenode debacle. A pretty significant amount of the channels stayed on Freenode after Andrew's takeover, until Andrew kicked them off himself with the mass Libera purge. There were many communities still on a wait-and-see approach -- at least until Andrew was revealed to be semi-insane (Emperor of Korea, digital territory, alt-right conspiracies, etc). Yes, the open source privacy crowd is a big chunk, but there were just as many social communities. Don't you remember the olden days of sex channels and all their drama? The roleplay, alt history, sci-fi, and just general random niche hobbies that populated the IRC landscape. IRC was, above all, a social space, it just so happens that many of these communities died or migrated to discord over time. Those that remain are those who are most attached to privacy/open source/etc, all the rest are gone.