I’m in a same boat, honestly.

Matrix has decent clients but managing a matrix instance is a world of pain, especially if you federate. And its resource use is really bad then: a single user instance can easily demand 4gb ram if you are in a couple popular chatrooms. Key propagation is oftentimes broken. Clients all have mixed support of features.

Xmpp is a joy to host, but there are no decent clients for iOS.

IRC is easy to host, but the IRCv3 coverage for clients is also meh.

I was looking for something that I could throw at casual people with relative ease and there’s just not a thing. Even the “techy” chat is in discord nowadays.