Is this like when people in the past said the postal system couldn't ever replace visiting someone, and that the telephone would never replace letters, and that chat apps couldn't beat a phone call..

People in tech (all tech since the beginning of the human race) have believed their inventions will nudge people to do things they might not otherwise do. Better swords and armour encouraged more battles, better farm tools encouraged more farming, better housing encouraged bigger families, better eduction encouraged more inventiveness, and so on. That's what tech is. Today that means Google's adverts push us to click on links and buy things, Facebook's status updates push us to share more, Instagram encourages us to take more selfies and pictures of our dinners, Twitter's retweets make us show people we discovered things they might want to see. The idea that people in tech wouldn't come up with apps that try to fix the lonely people by making them sociable is ridiculous. Apps and tech are all about behaviour manipulation.

And, mostly looking at all the evidence around us, it works really well.