Matchmaking is a casual way to enjoy the grouping aspects of the game and meet people without the hassle. It is far quicker than forming a group. Typically with Matchmaking, you want to enjoy the content and either need the help or others, or want the company of others. You might not even type to them, it still makes you feel connected and not playing a Single-Player game. I mean, old antiquated Diablo even had a Lobby system and I felt like I spent most of my time in groups rather than solo. They have this large open world and failed to capitalize on it.
Do you not see how far of a step back this is? This is akin to 20+ years ago me having to go into mIRC Chat rooms and try to round up people, start a Roger Wilco VC, and share an IP Address so we could have a shared game. That was tedious. We have the means to fix that, choosing not to and defending that decision is dumb.
Lost Ark has a Group Finder Tool and Matchmaking in addition to Global and Regional Chat. Any Legion Raid, you would use a Group Finder. For Guardian Raids and Hardmode Dungeons, Matchmaking was fine for that.
Lost Ark also did not have an effective communication system built into the game which pushed players to have to use Discord voice chat and lobbies. I am not a 15 year old kid and allowing a company to be lazy AF and use third party tools is stupid.
Your mentality is like defending Blizzard for doing a crappy job with their interface and relying on modders to fix their game for them in WoW. Or in Diablo 4s case if you want ANY meaningful information on the game you have to go to a third party website to plan and build your character or understant how damage is calculated, what the hidden Attack Speed buckets are and what the cap is, what the Armor scaling is by enemy level (until Blizzard straight out and said they are capping it, players had to figure that out).
The list goes on but there is no need to white knight the company for failing to provide players tools to have a better experience.