irb history works in Debian Linux out of the box. There's no etc/irbrc, nor do I have a ~/.irbrc. So, hmmmm.
This person put a bit more in his irbrc than you did. Do you suppose the ARGV.concat could be the missing piece?
require 'irb/completion'
require 'irb/ext/save-history'
ARGV.concat [ "--readline", "--prompt-mode", "simple" ]
IRB.conf[:SAVE_HISTORY] = 100
IRB.conf[:HISTORY_FILE] = "#{ENV['HOME']}/.irb-save-history"
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