It is really authentic but there are many better and new standarts out there thta makes irc unnecessary, but still for tha sake of authenticcity you may use it with friends etc. Me myself running a server for bunch of my friends and since all of them are into tech relevant topics we have written pretty cool irc bots.
btw i dont believe there is someone out here in lemmy who doesnt know irc
This guy knows a lot more than he shows