I agree that it's better than using multiple applications, but today I just use one (for personal conversations at least, Slack for business and Discord for communities is a bit different), which is texting.
My texting is scattered. I’d prefer it to be all XMPP, but I engage with Signal, & Mattermost, IRC, & Matrix on a regular basis… & largely this is a result of me just quitting the other chat platforms that most are using here (LINE, Facebook Messenger) which has made communications more difficult for others. I could run gateway to puppet all those accounts which is a lot closer than Pidgin was at unifying it all, but I’ve been a bit lazy to set it all up (& if the common gateway tool wasn’t Python I’d be more thrilled to touch it).
