I’m lucky to have a friend group who all get together semi-frequently on Discord to try out any new games we’ve found and enjoy. We all have pretty similar tastes in games, sometimes a few of us will be playing something others might not enjoy and vice versa, but in those instances we’ll still hang out and chat but just play our separate games instead.
I would agree that one roadblock is that we all have less time now as adults with careers (and other responsibilities) than we did when we were students, but we do our best to make time all the same.
In terms of public multiplayer with randoms - not for me, tbh.