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I would agree, although I might be slightly too young to remember in great detail how things worked upwards of ten years ago...I've made a small group of friends via discord, but I'm on their periphery, and it was accidental. Meeting on discord through hobbies probably ranks among the more common methods of meeting people online, these days, but any attempt I've made to do so intentionally outside this has been unsuccessful.
That existing connections are better facilitated is surely right. But the design of so much "social media" seems even to sustain these within such narrow confines of expression that the relationships are necessarily damaged or reduced. Both Instagram and Twitter encourage superficiality, the former in images and the latter in text. (Facebook dismisses itself from serious discussion.) Discord, and tools like it, are in theory preferable, but more often than not their communities have either far too many people to make yourself recognizable to anyone unless you engage with them obsessively, or so few that you're more or less trying to wedge your way into a clique.
I completely agree. I've found that the various parts of the Fediverse and also this site have been surprisingly good places to meet new people, but the mainstream internet today doesn't facilitate this. OkCupid was a great place to meet (even platonic) new people until about 2015, but in the 2000s it seemed people were in general much more open to meeting new people online. There were many great places to do this, but they're all either gone or have been ruined.