That said, you have to set yourself apart somehow. Different for every individual, and it takes a serious amount of effort. But it's not impossible, and it's not hopeless, and it's not pointless, and I sympathize and understand why you currently feel that it is.
Men are severely limiting themselves and distorting their reality, because lots of online sites are wasting their time and money. The ratio of women in many sites are low, lots of disguised prostitution, lots of pranksters wasting people's time, paid geeks (other men) to just string customers along, etc...
Yeah, and those people are on uppermost part of the attractiveness scale.
If you're average or below, you're going to be spending a LOT of time and effort on an app just for a single date. Do you really want to be spending hours of your day rolling the dice to play a fundamentally rigged game? Even the algorithms of these apps have bias. If your profile isn't well received, it will simply be pushed to the bottom of the card stack, or never even be shown.
Dating is extremely hard for people with disabilities or disfigurements. If that's you, I'm sorry. But if you're a regular guy in his 20s your dating pool is stupendously huge and the only thing holding you back is your attitude.
I wouldn't describe any of of them as ugly, but most weren't on the "uppermost part of the attractiveness scale"