I would say give it a go. There are good clients for desktop and mobile, and even Siskin on iOS is usable enough that I have onboarded friends and family with it. There are tons of servers to choose from if you don’t want to self host (which is orders of magnitude simpler and less resource intensive than Matrix). XMPP also has some other neat aspects to it, like pubsub and pep, which things like Movim build upon to make a truly decentralized and nomadic social networking platform. I also like that I can use it for sms and sip through jmp.chat :)

Also, since you mentioned encryption, OMEMO encryption on XMPP is way easier to use than Matrix IMHO. The only time it can be tricky is in group chats with a mismatch of clients. But for everyday chatting with family and friends, I never have to think about it and never have to worry about explaining to someone how to sync their keys between clients etc. The main clients people use nowadays handle it really well.