AIM->GAIM from the libre community, then Pidgin/Libpurple, with NAIM, CenterIM, TMSNC and OFC AMSN.
This is what happens when people which didn't live the era try to write an article with LLM slop.
I remember loving Freetalk against Mcabber and now Profanity because it could autocomplete anything you entered, not just nicknames.
On our LAN parties at the time, everyone started to use Trillian because of their support for the Bonjour protocol which used multicast DNS locally. That way you could easily "group teams" together, because the hostnames / IPs were also visible and you could add them then to the Hamachi groups where the games happened.
Hamachi was an amazing tool before they got bought, it made networking so easy for everyone; and you didn't even need to know what an IP was.