There's also a lot about attraction and compatibility that's not only nonverbal but inarticulable. "Chemistry", goes the analogy. The club environment is stacked in favor of the attractive, but chemistry usually wins the day.
I know this probably is somewhat less in other cultures. Certainly I seen no profiles with no picture in the USA but I still see 80% or so of profiles with no useful info in them, just generics.
Not suggesting a bar is better. I'd love to find and/or develop a better system that some how encourages better matches
It's the Red Army circa 1945 approach to dating. Throw enough bodies at the problem and eventually one of them will be the one that solves it.
If you want to make fewer higher quality matches don't go to a bar.
Which, as the non-photo portion of the prevailing Swipe-To-Date format shrinks, increasingly describes the problem with dating apps.
Similar problem with Instagram.
The interesting thing is that the success of these apps/media suggests they are how people engage and apparently behave as if they actually want, regardless of whether they might theorize something else would be better in some way.
Online you get to learn a bit more about them before you invest your time: do they have similar values, similar interests, compatible lifestyles and socio economics? Not all of it is written as text, a lot of it can be easily inferred from the photos, which is why Instagram is so popular these days in online dating as a lifestyle resume. Yes, it's heavily edited to show the best parts, like a resume, but you can still draw some conclusions from it. Like with hiring for your company, the mode you do it, the better you are at guesstimating what that person is like from their profiles. Several hundred first dates and your model gets trained with a lot of data.