DO and Linode are very expensive compared to OVH, Scaleway or Hetzner. So this reads as "Lightsail announces 50% price drop, will still be very expensive"
It is worth nothing that IRCv3 is a coup d'etat made by a closed coven of developers:
Most IRC clients are slowly developed or almost dead these days; the modus operandi of the IRCv3 developers is that they write patches for those IRC clients to support IRCv3 features and then push hard for the maintainers of those clients to merge them ("this is what the future of irc looks like! it's what the other clients are implementing! do you wanna be the only one not implementing it???")
They argue the development of their "standards" is open, but the truth is that nobody cares about it (most people are OK with IRC as it is now) so very few people contribute; they pretend that nobody complaining is a tacit agreement that everybody is OK with their changes, when that's far from the truth.
OVH has got a datacenter in Canada with good prices, compared to the rip-off Linode is.