The 4e minion with this exact adjustment you describe is precisely how our our table handles it.
My players love it when I throw swarms at them - an epic pile of miniatures on the table, carving a swathe through your enemies… it’s great power fantasy stuff, and a nice way of emphasising how powerful leveled characters are.
Online play was a godsend during lockdown, and introduced me to all sorts of digital tools our group still uses. If I ever meet that nice Mr. Strahd, I’ll have to buy him a drink for that alone.
But damn, if we couldn’t wait to go back to in-person play. For a bunch of 30-40 year old folks with jobs and kids and other assorted awkward bollocks, in-the-flesh DnD has been a magnificent way for us to enrich old friendships - and, even better for people our age, develop new ones.
And it does this without a requirement to get smashed at the pub, which is still very much the default socialising technique over here. Not that I mind getting fucked up, but I’m always on the lookout for ways to hang out with friends that doesn’t revolve 100% around booze. Getting to share collaborative story-telling with my people around a table still feels every bit as special now as it did when we started 15 odd years ago.