Online meetups (IME) are traaaash. Old-style meetups, most people would attend with a colleague or to meet up with someone specific, not randos who wandered in. New-style COVID meetups, you just have a pre-recorded talk or someone struggling with screen-sharing for 20 minutes, and then you have 20 anonymous windows on Zoom with only 2-3 people doing the thing where they're nominally asking a question, but actually telling some kind of tiresome and dubious anecdote.