Sure people use dating apps for those reasons, however there's a growing body of people who experience the exact opposite: Scammers and fake profiles. Over the past few years I've encountered no real people, just what was stated. Every single like/match turned out to be a fake profile or scammer, and this is after rejecting the obvious 'shy asian girl' scam profile. The fake profiles are actually men scamming other men by posing as a woman, the exchange ends once a legitimate user further screens by asking for a phone or video call. Nevermind dates, those are ghosts; legitimate users who didn't bother with asking for the phone or video call and instead went with setting up a date, only to have their time wasted.

This article is not very reflective of a substantial percentage of dating app users. Every single study concerning dating apps should at least impart data involving false positives, by which the majority of users encounter, and this number is declining due to the growing number of scammers. Today, most women "haven't used dating apps in years", explaining the vast percentage of inactive profiles that are not pruned, but kept to entice single men to stay and give the app money to see likes from scammers, if they're naive enough to believe said profiles are real.