I'm not the person you asked, but I share their opinion because JS and websockets do not appear to have any obvious relationship or applicability to IRC.
A reason to do it is because most internet users >99.9% have a web browser. <0.01% have an irc client. You could argue that Twitter or Slack has sort of filled this niche for people who want to do #topic based chat but if the goal is to do it in an open protocol, then that's imo why it would be applicable to irc.
Okay, but in which way is JS and WebSockets relevant to the IRC core protocol, if you usually have a proxy (such as KiwiIRC) which speaks IRC in the backend and HTTP/JS/websockets/whatever in the frontend.
