Well I'm older, I've made friends on forums, Fidonet, IRC etc., but I don't really share the sentiment here, I think it's nostalgia speaking here, you are older so you made friends in past and now it's more difficult and you blame the medium, while younger people nowadays are still making friends.

Forums were essentially replaced by Reddit and you can have pretty much same experience as in forum in small subreddit, because what is the difference in the end? You have there threads with replies which can be even quoted, but yeah, media content in comments is heavily discouraged by problematic support in clients.

Though I have less time and don't frequent small subreddits and main issue for me would be how anonymous (I don't mean real name, just how recognizable are users from each other) it feels, which is maybe partly because of my Reddit client setup and could be probably resolved by using large avatars at each post/comment, because name and flairs won't stick in the head as much.

Discord would be probably decent alternative to IRC nowadays.