Indeed it is not as polished and refined as the commercially supported service. Even if the self hosted services people stand up do not gain the same popularity as Discord they are nice to have when Discord is down or if people want to share something too sensitive for a corporation and their third parties to be trusted with.
On the plus side assorted IRC daemons have been around long enough that one can find Docker or Ansible examples to get started. More complex but popular IRC daemons such as UnrealIRCD [1] can be a little daunting at first yet have all the configuration directives and modules one could likely ever need. Many capabilities can also be disabled for simple setups. One of the simplest IRCD's to set up is ngIRCd [2]. I think the fastest I have set up ngIRCd including LetsEncrypt certs was around 5 minutes but that is because I get wildcard certs.
