there’s a whole system reinforcing the primacy of in-person events, including coprorations harveseting of PII via “leads” from events and judging ROI of expenditures entirely on that rather than anything related to actual community building
and also a lot of people enjoy jetsetting. I used to be be one of them!
but if I hadn’t already switched out of a front-facing marketing type role before the pandemic, for reasons, I would certainly have had to by now. and there’s not a lot of space for that in the industry. even tho we just had a couple years to practice a different way.