The issues with IFTTT happened a year ago and have been discussed at length, so I don’t think there’s a need to rehash it. Dan knows that some folks would like IFTTT support to come back, so if he’s able to bring it back in the future I’m sure he will.
If you just want to send commands out, you could use webhooks to trigger IFTTT. You won’t get any response from the device in openHAB, since it’s a one-way street, but that’s already the case with IR commands. @Jens_M wrote a quick tutorial for doing just that, and it’s relatively easy to implement. I’ve used webhooks with IFTTT before, but not with openHAB.