Please forgive the sniping from the shadows, but this triggered a past-self:

On Sat, Sep 11, 2021 at 2:17 PM Tassilo Horn <tsdh@gnu.org> wrote:

I think it
would make sense to run reconnect from a timer trying again every
`rcirc-reconnect-delay' seconds (probably with a minimum of 10 seconds
or so) because if something's wrong (broken connection) it might take a
bit longer before reconnect will work.

Whenever one (re-)connected, exponential back-off is your friend. In emacs, it's probably as easy as adding "(* 2" and ")" in the right place.

~Chad