I graduated college in 2014, and mostly thought the same thing to your points. I'm 32 now, I've been married for 7 years.
Life doesn't really "get" in the way of anything, that just is life. I've played on gaming communities for probably 20 years now starting on CS 1.6, and still kick it in Gmod, or still occasionally CSS. Gaming has just been a past time for me when I've got nothing else going on, it's my way to relax after work. The whole reason I started to play Gmod more frequently in the last 2 years I've been on GG is because it's a gaming forum and community.
I will say, that many of you don't know how good you have it to have a dedicated gaming community to play on. These communities were everywhere in the 00's and started to die off more in the mid 2010's, and are more rare it seems in the 2020s. For those who play the servers, and frequent the forums, you are all a part of a gaming tradition that is slowly being lost due to the change of gaming as a whole, and time itself.
There's that line from The Office where Andy says "I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days, before you've actually left them". And as probably fucking cringe it is for me to say that, I certainly think of the good old days playing on the PF and HG servers in CSS in the early 2010s that I've dumped thousands of hours into.
There is going to come a day this website, and the servers shut down. So soak in the time that you can play on these communities while you can.