Definitely not, players may be decentralized map wise but gather around bossing. My suggestion is to join a guild with active discord. Even if you don't use a mic it's where you're going to find that community feel.

It seems like maplestory is slowly dieing and the playerbase is pretty much equal to some private servers at peak times

it's 9:30 a.m. EST on a weekday and there are over 4000 players online through Steam alone (and most players use Nexon Launcher). I don't think I've seen a private server with more than a few hundred people online at most.

I know Nexon has also been on a roll of unpopular decisions as of late but the game has received so many updates and QoL changesI wouldn't ever want to go back to old-school maple.

Reboot is honestly so busy during peak times it's difficult to find maps to train in even with 40 channels available.