Comment by goodmythical

I think you're missing the "slowly build a friendship, and hopefully they (I) make friends with the regulars at dinner party" and wrongly assuming that the potluck is the end of the road.

They don't say that they don't then go on to develop deeper friendships outside of the potluck, only that the potluck is a step in the road. It provides a low-stress low-stakes scene of congenially likely like-minded people in which people who are relative strangers can pair and group off if they choose to.

Approaching someone at a potluck like this, or chatting to your dinner neighbors, is way easier and likely more fruitful than chatting up strangers at a bar.

It is far easier to develop a friendship with someone who you can see interacting positively with your other friends. Easier to see more facets of an individual as they interact with people of slightly differing opinion.

I really genuinely cannot conceive how you're seeing it as a graveyard rather than a garden. Like...throwing a potluck is so vastly much more effort than showing up to someone else's event. They are putting genuine effort in to regularly surrounding themselves with people they enjoy. There's just no way that any of those people are "fake friends". They may be but mere acquantances, but even then these are people that are chosen to be invited. Everyone there is there because they were wanted and wanted to be there. If the host feelt they were fake friends, they wouldn't be invited, would they?

Compare this to a monthly coworker dinner where the only reason everyone's there is because the boss said so. Where everyone agrees Janice from accounting is always trying way to hard to laugh at everyone's jokes and Bob from QA just didn't quite grok the message behind "How to Make Friends and Influence People" and so uses everyone's name in every sentence because he figures that's important.