Yes they are wrong. A contribution may consist of “merely” a bug report. Even just asking questions may indicate that the UX or documentation is lacking.

No? This will search the logfiles (if irssi is configured to create those at all) for a pattern. This still requires that you had to have an irssi client running and connected to the server/channel in question, during the time the user is afk. Which is why others recommend e.g. setting up ZNC.

There are also mutt and neomutt.

I personally have been using the latter for years, but it requires some time to setup and tweak until it fits your purposes.

Documentation is top-notch though, and customizability a first-class concern.

and then suddenly there’s the perfect use case

Yeah but like WHAT?

I think you generally can’t know if someone shared their code with the intention that others may use it, but it’s a reasonable assumption.

I find this unnecessarily derisive. There are good reasons for a UI or README not being user-friendly, the top-most one being (imo) that it is really, really hard to get right, takes a lot of time and doesn’t primarily solve the problem the project was started for.