Ah, um, re-registering was probably a bad idea; the new management is kind of a mix of greedy, ruthless investor and delusional egomaniac— chances are good your information is not only not secure, but will be used for something you probably don't want. (Even if we get lucky and that turns out to just be using the number of real users to help advertise.) (Also not getting into fake NickServs and such.)
For another reason for not using Freenode anymore; the registered nick and channel information wasn't lost accidentally, it was deleted.
For a third; new-Freenode now bans connections from all clients the crazy owner doesn't like, which started with IRCCloud but then expanded to cover most others.
For a fourth; all channels that mentioned moving away from Freenode in their topics immediately had control of that channel taken from them automatically.
For a fifth; channels such as #fsf and #gnu were simply removed, for no apparent reason, and can't be reopened.
For a sixth; anyone who talks badly about the new ownership where they can hear gets banned. Anyone who mention's the owner's nickname (rasengan) where the anti-spam bot can hear gets auto-banned.
For a seventh; as a result of the previous reasons and more, there just isn't very many people left on Freenode— it's all controlled migrations to either OFTC or Libera (or finally moving channels to their own servers and networks instead of using popular ones).
I mean, I guess it really doesn't matter much for us either way, but I certainly don't have any open connections to Freenode anymore, and I'm unlikely to soon.
Found some links for another couple perspectives;
one that's been passed around a lot and
one from someone just documenting the chaos and ruin (using a Nitter filter instance to make Twitter bearable).