I don’t see the need to paste either? Paste a link to an image sharing site or codebin?
The need exists, and has been for a while now. Refusal to accept that fact is what’s leading to reduced use of IRC protocol. Sure, you might not see the need, but everyone is not you. Especially for work and development images can come handy.
I can understand people being use to unavailability of such features. When we were trying to figure out a solution for our development team which is mostly working form home, IRC was one of the options. We tried using IRC, Matrix, and bunch of others. While IRC was really fast and reliable its main issues were poor mobile support, where client would get disconnected when switching networks and multimedia support. Matrix and Tox supported these but there were so many problems with them at the time. So everyone pushed towards Slack. Luckily I had enough influence to not allow it and we finally settled with Signal, which is far from perfect, but it works for what we need it.
Sending files in this day and age shouldn’t be a question of having public IP and routed ports and messing around with settings.