I always had much better luck with online dating. At least on those sites you are reasonably certain they are available and wanting to date and/or hook up with people.

I went to a ton of meetups and group events in real life over the course of three years (and to a lesser extent for years before that), met a lot of women through that, but very few of them were either not in a relationship or emotionally available at the time (either too focused on their career, in an 'it's complicated' situation, going through crap with family, not very financially stable, waiting for their unicorn and would accept nothing less, etc). Many of these women I never saw with anyone or spoke about being with anyone over the course of many years in successive meetups.

To be fair, I was in a similar situation through a good chunk of my 20s when I was either working my butt off for startups or completely broke, so I understand.

But online dating was much less frustrating for me.