Not really, the company can unilaterally ban someone or a server. With IRC you can start a private server and you are not at the mercy of anybody else. And you

Not really, the company can unilaterally ban someone or a server. With IRC you can start a private server and you are not at the mercy of anybody else. And you are not nagged all the time to guilt your users into boosting the server so they can use more features. Your users don't have to pay if they want to have different profiles on different servers. Your users can use any interface they want to access the service... So you are right in a sense that discord replace IRC as a means of communication for the majority, but in term of freedom it is a regression. If IRC had supported offline history keeping things could have been different, but for the people I know it was a major blocker for adoption. They didn't want to have to setup a server to bounce from or keep something running all the time.