There is nothing about IRC that prevents it from providing those features, and many of them already exist in various clients. Ircle had video support in the 90s

There is nothing about IRC that prevents it from providing those features, and many of them already exist in various clients. Ircle had video support in the 90s, Linkinus supports embedded media, and persistence is simply a matter of using a ZNC proxy (IRCcloud has it built in). P2P file transfers have been in IRC for decades, but it would be a piece of cake to integrate a media host into an IRC client. The CTCP portion of IRC makes it possible to do just about anything you want, as long as both parties are using clients that support the action.