Yeah, I was being a bit facetious with that comment. It does seems like we're all being forced back to '90s (aka Internet stone age).
IRC is still a time-consuming, convoluted pain in the ass just as it was then. That's why it will never be conquered or tamed by "The Man."
I forsee more and more Usenet binaries being uploaded with nonsense cryptic file names. Not only will someone have to download headers, you'll also have to just download EVERYTHING in a particular group and decode/extract the shit to find out what it is.