there’s a difference between using irc for livetime troubleshooting and not having a forum at all and directing everyone to your livechat discord. i’m sure some sicko out there has run an OSS project on only IRC, but their project likely got no traction because a history of problemsolving posts is important in open source. generally speaking, you need:

• a wiki
• a static indexable searchable forum
• a live chat place for real time communication for novel problems

too many projects these days only have that last one in the form of discord