I guess part of it is that I got accustomed to a very different culture overall when it came to online chat and gaming (which seems to have undergone a massive sea change that might have entirely happened in 2016, it's hard to tell because before that it still felt like oldschool was alive and well and then I spent most of 2016 struggling IRL, not getting back on my feet enough to MMO until spring of the next year). Also being socially awkward and neurodivergent doesn't seem to do me any favors these days too, while it was common enough among the old guard Xennial generation online to be much more easily accepted, nowadays gaming seems to be a regular person's activity to the point that us "spoony" types are just as awkward online as IRL
I recall joining a recruitment Discord at some point in Stormblood and not really being able to find much of anything suitable in it; I usually try to get the lay of the static land by browsing the ffxiv recruitment subreddit lately. When I mean late night, I mean the real late night (like, after 11:30PM-midnight late, and I'm also Central US time which seems not to help much either). Like I said, there seemed to be a lot more night owls, and then something happened in 2018 that suddenly made everyone need to go to bed early and I'm not even sure what.
Also Discord in general has always felt particularly awkward to me compared to previous gamer hangout venues. Servers almost invariably seem to come in only two types, the huge public ones that tend to be extremely heavily moderated (and thus particularly anxiety inducing for someone like me, and sadly I more than a few times lost my cool as a result) and tiny private ones that you have to be told about to even know they exist (and which are usually so tiny that they are largely ineffective for actual grouping, even though they are usually good places to chill socially). I feel we used to have more choice in general, but this seems to have dried up and been absorbed into the huge centralized servers (when World Visit came out the effect was especially devastating, with server cultures being lost in the merge to DC level organization instead), so now it's like you have one acceptable player mindset per Data Center that you either are forced to conform to or you're practically pushed out of content altogether ...