Late to the party but this has nothing to do with group finders. Go play a game without group finders like DDO and you'll realize pretty quick that not having a GF is a huge pain in the ass.

EverQuest was chatty because that's all there was to do in EverQuest. You had 5+ minutes of downtime between every pull. FFxi early on wasn't much better with downtime so there was still a lot of chatting. Chatting in game started to die around the same time we had something to do more then every 5 minutes.

If you miss the camaraderie or feel lonely, your best bet is Discord. Find your games/servers discord and join it. Invite other people you're playing with to it. I belong to four discords just for Dungeons and Dragons Online, a game with a population of like 7 people, and there's almost always people chatting in them.

Be the change you want to see. Things have gotten better. I can now log into discord and see all the memes and chatting that went on since I last logged in. I can voice chat with my friends. We can sync up Netflix and watch some shitty anime while we grind.

The community is all there, alive and having a great time. It's on you to join it, it's not going to force your hand.