That is what happens when the thing that matters to everyone is to get stuff done and fast. The general difficulty got adjusted to the point where people never have a reason to cooperate in the open world, crafting got relegated to the side lines and is usually not worthwhile enough and even then people would rather have alternative characters that do the few dependencies there are instead of relying on someone else. or there is an NPC that solves that issue outright. Then there are the tools that automate finding a group for the things where you absolutely need a group and you bet no one interacts in those groups… Oh no, it’s rush to the end cause everyone got different things to do including so many daily quests. No time for even banter.
You want community? Great, slow down the game and see if that helps. Sure you may loose players that way that liked the pure convenience but if players find that they have time they may just start interacting.
Me personally, well I stopped playing MMOs entirely simply because the magic that was community got killed off exactly like that. Why play in an otherwise boring and dead world when the big promise of the genre is to play in a shared world WITH other players.
People have been trending away from random online interactions for decades. With good reason. As populations increased the ability to police behavior plummeted. Negative interactions skyrocketed and now few people want to chance abuse with it being so common.
It’s also partly what you said: people want to get stuff done. I remember EverQuest 1 and Nexus. You couldn’t do shit solo. People generally want to be able to actually play the game and accomplish something and they don’t always have 30-60 min to look for a group before they can start playing.
It’s a very different market these days and people have a lot of things they can do with their time. Playing chat roulette to play a game doesn’t cut it.
EQ2 recently launched their own classic server. My wife who has been an avid player for decades is delighted. She always loved the crafting which has been totally dumbed down in later versions.
And within hours of joining the classic server she has also joined a guild like in the good old days. Sure, she is sad to see her the millions upon millons of platinum gone. But now on the classic server money is suddenly a viable currency again. So all is well.