I guess my mistake might've been in trying to approach it as a typical RPG, while I should have instead tried to find some players to befriend in the game?

It's moreso that you were forced to find friends back in the day. Vanilla WoW was still pretty similar to that, but the older games like FFXI and Everquest required that you team up in a party to level at all. It led to a completely different experience, where a server was a community of people who you knew and played with for years. There were repuations, drama, politics, player run events, infamous trolls; everything that no longer exists in MMOs that actually made them great and not just multiplayer games with a big lobby.