There are plenty of old school forums. Example: I recently got into leatherworking. There are a couple of subreddits for it but also a large and active forum at https://leatherworker.net/forum/.
Reddit has discoverability and single sign on for a bunch of forums. It also has some fun nice to haves like a mixed feed of all your interests. But old school forums tend to be less commercial and sometimes can be a lot more tightly knit.
The biggest annoyance I have with old school forums is the single threaded nature of them. Reading through an entire 200 post thread to see if anyone actually responded to the one question that was asked in the third post is just incredibly inefficient and annoying.
Reddit has discoverability and single sign on for a bunch of forums. It also has some fun nice to haves like a mixed feed of all your interests. But old school forums tend to be less commercial and sometimes can be a lot more tightly knit.