Yeah, I have experienced that as well and I get your point, that's mainly why we have created a whole structure and registered an organization, even if we can never predict what will happen next we can always do our best to get the odds in our favour.
Unfortunately, the best alternative would probably be the P2P way, with something like https://matrix.org/ which also seems to be nice.
Yeah. In fact, there is a lot of networks but they are made because people want to experiment and operate a server then they wonder what they could use it for. Here, well, we had a goal and IRC was a solution, as once you have your channel you just have to add an iframe on your website and tadam, a fully functioning live webchat with permissions! ;)
To clear that up a bit, you can register a channel like #domain.tld only if you control the DNS zone of the said domain, and you can't get op in a primary channel without registering it first.