IRC is kind of an IETF standard. That is, there are RFCs for the IRC protocol that are a useful introduction, but they don't cover basic user-visible things like `/me` or formatting codes (colour/bold/etc), and even the non-IETF specs that cover those things aren't necessarily reliable (the CTCP spec has a whole thing about how to encode metacharacters in payloads that in practice everybody ignores).
At least these IRCv3 guys are writing down what they're doing.
There are unofficial extensions, yeah, but that doesn't make IRC not be standard. I think it just needs to happen that someone gets the various extensions finally standardised.
At least these IRCv3 guys are writing down what they're doing.