I feel like you need to compare a 10 person video call with a 10 person in office meeting. And of course, a hallway chat vs a 1-1 zoom call or discord exchange.
Ten person meetings have felt better for me in person. I think it's because there's more room for impromptu overlapping discussions, which Zoom doesn't support well.
This is the billion-dollar problem in VoIP. I call it the "cocktail party problem", because a cocktail party is the most extreme example. In meatspace, you're able to drift between conversations subtly queuing to the other participants in a breakout conversation that you're engaging with them, while still being able to pick up on nearby conversations which you can choose to swap to.
A multi-call system like a Discord server represents a small step, with the ability to see that conversations are happening in other calls, and maybe get a guess of what they're doing thanks to live presence, but it's far from a complete solution.
Gather Town was tackling this issue surprisingly well during COVID, but anytime I tried to convince people to use it they defaulted back to Zoom because Gather was too confusing. I think it would take a real paradigm shift from the "call with video" model to get decent adoption of something like that, and now that it's so expensive to use Gather I don't see how they can get enough exposure to really convince the public at large.
Perhaps another factor is that it doesn't seem like the nine other participants are always staring towards you, personally, specifically, persistently. There are breaks and ebbs and flows, as other people talk and you can take turns as an observer from the side.