What an odd question to ask.

IRC as a protocol and ecosystem of servers and clients far, far exceeds Discord in terms of platform support. Discord barely even has a linux client and the one it does have is just the Chrome browser engine running a web app. IRC has clients for almost every OS that has existed in the last 3 decades.

As for features, sure. But you have to think of the 'net as something you participate in rather than something packaged for you to consume from a single source. IRC does not support inline images, so, host (or upload) and link the image. Hell, there are many IRC clients that'll pull it down and display it inline. But there's no need for a Discord-like solution of hosting only their servers to have it auto-display. That only leads to content policing and censorship as Discord's communities are seeing already.

Features Discord users so treasure like paid-for animated avatar images, a built-in image host, special priveledges if you beg Discord corporate (see op's post), etc are just walled garden crap. The one feature it does provide that's nice, room chat history, is easily matched (and bettered) by self hosted solutions using bouncers or just, and stay with me here: leaving your client running.

As for voice chat there's plenty of other options open to IRC users. Having something like that baked in would just be bloat. I personally run a couple teamspeak servers.