Some of my own experience: Meetup.com is an awful platform that now has a value-extraction owner who will just make it even worse, as bad as it is now. Don't use Meetup.com. Second, being a meetup organizer is a thankless task. People have no idea how much work goes into the operation, and this article helps show all of that. But after all the work is done, there's no glory for the organizer. There's no loyalty or appreciation, so if you disappear tomorrow, people will just go somewhere else, and few months later forget you even existed.

After running meetups for many years, even big ones, I realized it's not worth it, and I'll never do it again. The same goes for big events, such as conferences, etc. It takes even more work to run and organize those, not to mention the cost, and there's simply very little juice to squeeze.