Something that I think would go a LONG way toward encouraging a new breed to get into amateur radio is not just saying "You can do digital -- oh and here's a $25 Chinese handheld FM radio" but a $50 (or less) TNC that connects your UV-5R (or equivalent) radio to your computer or smartphone so the cost of going from zero to slinging packets on AX.25 is under $100 (not counting the cost of your computer or phone, of course).
You can get started with pretty junky coax and a homemade antenna, although antenna parts that used to be common are sometimes now less-so. I spent part of my day visiting stores looking for twinlead or ladderline and found none.
check out a $30 four-speed KISS TNC for $30 called "NinoTNC".
Also a ham radio cable manufacturer called hammadeparts.com
Beware that the Baofeng radio has many configurable elements, some of which get in the way of doing packet. Also, the radios are built like crap and can hurt you during operation.
There are used radios like the Kenwood TK760g for not much more than a Baofeng but they do 25watts output. < %70 each. Sometimes down to $30.
There are a number of "sub-hobbies" within amateur radio. It's a lot like asking what people with a Linux box actually do with their setups. From a completely practical point of view, the internet and cell phones can do most of what ham radio can do; people do it for fun.
Technical or social conversations are definitely a common activity. Especially during the first few months of COVID my local repeaters were very active just with people seeking a bit of human community.
Emergency preparedness is a common side hobby; many municipal/county emergency services have a corresponding ARES/RACES group with which they have points of contact, regular drills, and so on.
Other sub-hobbies are more purely technical, like DX (long distance communication; there will be contests with goals like "most different countries contacted"), or QRP (doing as much as possible with minimal radio power); satellite or moonbounce or meteor-scatter; homebrew (building some or all of your equipment); a variety of (usually low bandwidth) packet switched networks; slow-scan video; etc.
Orthogonal to all of the above is the variety of modes and bands people use: you can use VHF FM handhelds not unlike a walkie-talkie; voice or digital or Morse modes; microwave or 2-meter (city-range) or 80-meter (continent-range) or etc; traditional hardware or SDR or deliberately archaic tubes; operating from home or your car or packing your station on foot to a remote mountaintop.
I'm part of a TARPN and the main thing we do is chat. There is a simple chat program that runs on the network so we can do realtime multi-user chat. It's pretty fun.
The trick is to get a few Raspberry PIs and install the software. The NinoTNCs are really cheap so you can make a network on your desk without any radios. Then get the radios after you can con some couple of other hams within a few miles to play with it with you. It's a kick.
Once you decide sending packets from point A to point B is a good idea, one must look at what percentage of the available bandwidth is actually usable.
Many hams think of packet radio in terms of building a single station, for a user-end-terminal, or for a relay, and generally going along with the current in-use frequency for the purpose of getting access to existing other stations.
This turns out to be a bad idea though because channel bandwidth is mostly wasted when participating on the same channel as other disinterested parties to whom you will be interfere, and take interference from. The channel bandwidth actually achieving good result (i.e. message delivery) on a shared channel is pretty minuscule compared to the available bandwidth, because of necessary redundancy, or because of retries, combine with channel time lost to collisions, weak signal, and back-off channel sharing timers.
A much more efficient approach works by having the new station actually consider themselves part of a network, and then creating a cooperative dedicated collision free channel to the next station. This, however, requires considering two stations at a time when "getting on packet". I highly recommend this method as it results in far better channel performance.
NCPACKET.ORG has 35 stations in a well thought out network, and they can run IRC-LIKE 20-way chat sessions which are lively and non-directed, with impunity, and low latency (60 seconds or less from end to end of an 8-hop-wide network).
Does anything like that exist?