By that point there were other options that were more popular, yeah. Xdcc as a script for ircii came out around 1995ish, maybe a bit earlier. Early 2000s would be around when mirc scripts had xdcc bots built in, so well after they first became common.

At that point you also had Napster, kazaa, limewire, even the first bittorrent client (BitTorrent).