Dating itself isn't necessarily bad but a lot of dating apps are. If you don't want someone terminally online don't meet them online. Then you can maybe add eachother on social media later if you both have it.
Well, that's just it. Dating apps are meant for terminally online antisocial rejects and adjacent groups. Normally functioning people don't use or need them. If I look at all the couples I know IRL, myself included, none of us have ever used a dating app. We just go about our lives and luck into meeting people we hit it off with. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and that's fine. Of course, if you're a terminally online dweeb who lives their whole lives in an echo chamber like KF or certain subreddits, you'd think that dating apps = modern dating sucks because it's inconcievable to such types that actually having a life is the best pussy (or dick) magnet around.
No normal, self-respecting person uses a dating app. Dating apps are glorified honeypots for antisocial losers to blow their paychecks on shit like Tinder Gold. It's why it's so funny when incels point to that Jeremy Meeks "study," as if it'd be surprising that a bunch of shallow, self-absorbed, terminally online "YASSSS KWEEN SLAY" types wouldn't pine for him.
Just like the following example, Katie Lee Pitchford, when you reverse the genders:
Of course terminally online, pornsick men would gush over this woman, and they have. Even her boyfriend, whose balls she crushed, wanted her back, took her back.
But normal people would never associate with Jeremy or Katie, and that's why "muh dating apps, bro" is a lame excuse and pure cope.
If you judge the world by the internet, then you really are quite daft. Most people are like Xiaomanyc rather than (insert problematic figure here). And even if I used dating apps, I wouldn't think AMALT or AWALT because it still wouldn't make any reasonable sense.