Glad this post resonated with you. And oof, yeah, I very much know that feeling of having my head done in by social media sites and infinite scrolling just to find I'm just making myself more and more unhappy. And yes to the FOMO. Especially when I see people post such great art to Tumblr and nowhere else (which I understand -- it's much easier to post art to Tumblr and I rarely post/crosspost art to DW myself). Maybe I'll see if I can try to make an exception for interacting with fanart on Tumblr because it really does feel like I'm missing half of the fandom sometimes when I ignore Tumblr? But at the same time, Tumblr is such a bad website for actually engaging with artists. T_T

I think another issue can be with Internet generations that never experienced LiveJournal/mailing lists/forums/etc, and so only see the downsides of platforms like Dreamwidth (more effort to "engage" compared to a like or reblog, needing to have your own thoughts, etc) without necessarily understanding the payoff.
And yes, I very much agree with this. The reward for these kinds of slow, high-effort forms of engagement can take a long time to materialize, so if you haven't personally experienced how it can pay off, the sugar candy version of engagement feels much more concrete/real, and that's all a lot of people raised on modern social media know.