“In the early days of IRC, it was quite common for someone with basic programming skills to write a simple IRC bot within a matter of hours.”
IRC is plain text over a socket. You can learn it by watching packets in Wireshark and talk to a server with netcat. Try writing a Slack or Discord bot without an SDK, an OAuth dance and a developer portal. The walled gardens killed the hobby bot, and a generation of programmers lost its first project.