I always find it surprising that so many people struggle to make effective human connections over chat. I think it must be generational, as I believe these are the connections I and other young people prefer.
Making that solid foundation requires a lot of work though and not everyone has the communication (or empathy) skills to make it work.
Has worked for me, but I'm an outlier in that I grew up on IRC chatrooms before more rich-text and composite media communication methods were available.
Most people on this site in particular are likely to be outliers too: as the way we are communicating right now is as stripped down as possible and people will self-select for this.
Online games work well, because you have a visual and full engagement.
Compare that to work communications... You are totally async on slack, it's just a simpler version of email at this point. Just because people are online in Slack today, doesn't mean that they'll respond within minutes.
If someone is online playing a game, you know that they're there. Old IRC was pretty much the same.