When I came to Twitch in 2020 I thought the chat was juvenile to say the least. When I found out it used IRC I jumped on board immediately. Then the great freenode collapse happened. Then I finally discovered the draw of emotes (and craved them myself in certain streams that I actually started watching myself). So now I have a rather different view of Twitch chat.
As much as I love IRC (the tech on which Twitch is based) it has a few major flaws:
That last one is huge. When there are a ton of messages scrolling it is nearly impossible to establish the context of any single message, so it better stand on its own or be a direct reply to another. As a Twitch viewer I have found this single thing to blow away any other method of chat, despite the limitations of the Twitch chat interface.
So if and when I create an integration it will be by way of bot and I will use that for sending messages so that I can not break when they decide to change. The bot interface will be able to adapt to whatever backend they decide to keep.