Yeah, netsplits were really common; nickserv and/or chanserv not working for long periods making popular channels a hell without ops.

I think the centralisation is the issue, I could connect to a different IRC network with a community around the same topic/game. When Discord is down there's nowhere else to go.

Ah yes. chanserv and nickserv hiccups were bad. I remember that now, but they were not as catastrophic as outages we see today.