I agree, yeah. I read or heard something for how online games feel like they operate these days; they're built for people who have an hour or two a day at most to get on and do stuff so the systems have to give them some semblance of progress to reflect that. Dungeon finder, raid finder, all of that sort of stuff ended up butchering MMO communities because you'd be dropped in with people you didn't know and would never see again. No reason to interact. No reason to be nice. No shared accomplishment. As you said; effectively no different from a single player game with bots.
Playing a private World of Warcraft server with a smaller community, one without the dungeon finder and having a world chat, was the last experience I really had with what felt like a social and cooperative game. You were forced to interact and make friends because it's how you got things done. There wasn't any chat filtering or policing or sharding or anything to artificially stifle the community and it really flourished because of that. Me and a friend ended up being pillars of the server just by always being down to do stuff even if it didn't benefit us and share our knowledge. It feels like that sort of experience is getting rarer and rarer with each passing year.