I think your confusion comes because online dating isn't dating. A date takes potentially a couple of hours at max. Online dating refers to the process of searching for someone to date via the internet. A date can take an hour or two. Looking for a date online can take hundreds of hours without any results save for a few catfish scams.
I think you've confused "going on date" with "dating". The process called "dating" has always included the initial part of sorting through possible prospects to go on a date with. Online dating is more efficient than what went before.
The process has also included getting-to-know-you conversation and trust-building, neither of which this impersonation accomplishes.
A date does take a couple of hours max. But if it works, it blossoms into a relationship, which takes significant time. And that same sort of significant time can be applied to dating.
Dating has multiple different meanings in English. Not only do I know this, but you're attempt to correct me is a re-statement of what I said in my own post: dating can refer to the process of finding someone to begin dating.
Online dating can be a long torturous experience. That is why people are saying they want to skip it and do the parts that are enjoyable. Some because it was long and people don't have time for it. Some because it can be torturous and life is too short to put up with that.
Dating can be a long, difficult experience, on line or off. So the online part is irrelevant here except that it makes fraud possible.
I understand that humans in general are lazy, and normally I am fine with that. But a) being lazy is different than not having time, b) if you don't have time to date, you also don't have time for a relationship, and c) you can't just skip the early parts of building a relationship. That's not how dating works.
Dating offline can be one of the most frightening euphoric experiences a person will ever have even if the result of an attempted approach is rejection. I remember asking a girl out for the first time. It was nothing like swiping right a few hundreds times and then sending a message to someone who swiped back only to never receive a response. I felt so good that it scared me even hours later when I was no longer feeling the euphoria. There are huge differences between dating online and offline. Real differences that really matter.
It isn't true that online dating isn't relevant to whether a person can have time in their life for online dating.
When people talk about not having time for something, they are speaking in a metaphorical sense about the value of their time. Truly, most people have time to count to a million, but most people don't have time to count to a million.
Online dating is less efficient than what went before. Online dating is more efficient than what before. Both of these statements are true. There are some metrics where is it worse. There are some metrics where it is better. For example, if you are trying to maximize the number of rejections per second, than online dating is very efficient. Even speed dating doesn't have as many rejections per second as online dating.
